Image Credit: Film Images
Drive, the deliriously bloody and overwrought Ryan Gosling art thriller that premiered two years ago at Cannes, is a movie that I found stylish in its way (it was hard not to, given that the film was nothing but style), but also luridly unconvincing. I didn’t see it, or even hear anything about it, until its opening weekend, and later, as I caught up with the ecstatic reviews and began to talk to people who thought it was some sort of nihilistic pop masterpiece, I realized that the elements of Drive that I had experienced as borderline loopy — like, say, the entire plot, or Albert Brooks’ corned-beef-meets-ham performance as a “dangerous” mobster — were experienced by others as hiply stylized. You really could read Drive either way: as a sort-of-real-world thriller that didn’t hang together, or as a gorgeously violent tone poem that existed in its own (unreal) world. READ FULL STORY »
