Drive

I wrote this one off years ago. I put it on as a teenager wanting something like Fast and Furious, watched maybe twenty minutes, decided it was boring, and turned it off. I came back to it this year almost by accident, a recommendation I followed without much hope, and it is now one of the best films I have ever seen. The movie did not change. I did.

What got me is how quiet it is. It is slow, and it trusts silence to do the talking. The main character barely speaks. He stares, he waits, and somehow you always know exactly what he feels. The first time I watched it I wanted noise, so I missed everything.

He has two sides, and both are quiet. One is a simple, almost ordinary man who fixes cars and does stunt driving for film shoots. The other, the one in the scorpion jacket, is dangerous. It is not a superhero switch, there is no transformation. He stays completely human, and as the film goes on you realize how dangerous he actually is, while the ordinary side of him gets more and more vulnerable. A man who can do terrible things and mostly chooses not to is far more interesting than a man who only fights.

The thing I keep coming back to is that he lives by a small set of rules. He gives himself five minutes, no more, and works only on his own terms. They are his rules, the kind nobody else would understand and that you could never really explain, and they quietly run his whole life, and they work. Watching someone hold that much control, do only what is necessary and say only what is needed, felt less like watching a character and more like watching a way of living.

And it is not cold, which surprised me. A man that dangerous, and the film is full of feeling, tenderness even, the vulnerable side sitting right next to the violent one. Most of that feeling comes from the woman next door and her little boy. He falls for her quietly, never pushes anything, just shows up for them, and almost everything dangerous he does later is to keep the two of them safe. He protects her and asks for nothing back. Most films like this keep the guy a blank wall. This one does not, and that is why it stays with you. It is human in a way that hit close.

The soundtrack is one of the best I have heard, the kind I went back and played on its own. Ryan Gosling is the only person I can picture in the role, the quiet dangerous man. And the ending I did not see coming, which almost never happens to me. I usually call an ending ten minutes in. This one I had to sit with.

Here is the honest catch. It is slow, and it takes a good half hour to find its feet. It nearly lost me once already. If you sit down wanting action you will bounce off it the way I did the first time. It asks for patience, and it asks to be watched the right way, alone, at night, somewhere calm. Give it that and it opens all the way up.

I am not really reviewing it. I am admiring something. It is less a film than an experience, a piece of art, and the most useful thing I can tell you is what I told a friend: do not ask me why, just go watch it.