Guy: I don’t have wheels… on my car…Girl: Okay!!! (laughing)
Guy: That’s one thing you should know about me.
Guy: You’ve got five minutes?
Girl: Yeah…
And there begins our odyssey into the beautiful and wonderful world of “NICOLAS WINDING REFN”’s newest film, DRIVE—starring Ryan Gosling… no matter how hard I try, I still can’t get my brains to remember the directors name… shite! Anyway, there’s no way you can end up forgetting the name Drive, so try and stick to that and google it to find the others—sometimes, along with Winding’s name I even end up forgetting Ryan’s and Mulligan’s… maybe I should go in for a brain scan or something?
Just from the first scene—that first time when they meet, as he’s walking towards the elevator and she’s walking out of it, you know—or rather, I knew that there was something big that was going to happen between these two (I didn’t know who Mulligan was at that time), and I just love it when I’m right… cos in their next scene together, Carey is walking through the isle of the same supermarket that Ryan’s in, and he notices that there’s a small boy with her, so he turns around and starts walking in the other direction… I can’t tell you how many times I’ve done this, to avoid the woman of my dreams by doing something so asinine…
But, of course you’re going to have to watch the whole movie to know what exactly happens… yes, yes, they do end up falling in love, but what is it that happens to bring it to a screeching halt… There are two scenes here which really standout for me: no. 1, where Ryan is carrying Benecio through the corridors of the apartment building where they live (Carey and Ryan stay in the same housing complex) and there’s something about a woman trusting a man enough so as to give him her child to carry, and Nicolas did a fantastic job to capture that.
Scene two is to come later on in the film, it’s the one in which Ryan’s taking Carey out for dinner, I think (they’ve graduated to official Date status now) and she reaches out and plants the palm of her hand over his, when it’s resting on the stick-shift, and that’s it… no touching bodies, no squeezing body parts or anything else… that’s all you need to know that there has been something significant that’s just occurred between these two people. And to drive home the point, what does Winding do, but he lets Ryan close his fist with Carey’s hand resting on top of it, and it’s magical.
Of course, I want to try and keep this thing to a minimum, and just talk about those scenes which made the most impact on me, so I’ll try and not bore anyone who’s actually bothering to read this stuff with too much detail… but the next scene/s are the ones with the cars of course, and Ryan drives three of them which I’d put in my garage, any day… the Chevy Impala, which Bryan Cranston says is the most popular car in the state of California ((I think that’s what he says, and not the city of LA—I’m sorry, I’m very anal about this kind of stuff)); and then we have the beautiful Chevrolet Chevelle that he uses to take Carey and Benecio home, and then out to the flood gates in LA, and finally the date where he gets to touch her… and of course the Ford Mustang, I think it was, which he uses for the final car-chase scene, and boy-oh-boy—does he know how to handle himself when he’s driving those machines.
But he knows how to handle himself in a lot of other ways too, and you soon find that out, not the least of which was the way how he dispenses with those two thugs who’d been sent to get rid of him and Christina Hendrick’s… and then there’s that guy who shows up at his apartment building, while he’s in the lift with Carey, and he knows that this might be the last chance he gets to kiss her, and so, he gently holds her by placing his hand on her back, and leans in to kiss her as softly as he can, and that scene is the highlight of the film, with the light suddenly dimming and only the focus remaining on Ryan and Mulligan, and them kissing, and then…
Ryan turns around and becomes this monster, the monster that he feels he’s been sent here to protect Carey and Benicio from, because all of this was for them, the robbing of the pawn shop so that Standard could get the money to pay back the people who he owed money to for protection when he was in prison, and for Carey’s sake (and Benicio’s) when he finds out that the two goons he’s just seen leaving his building have threatened Standard’s wife and child by warning him that they’re going to come after them next, so he then decides to get involved.
The last thing that I want to talk about is, when Ryan, or rather The Driver enters the Topless bar and goes in to find the guy who had hired him and tried to get him killed, is sitting right there with his face deep in a woman’s breasts—he takes out the hammer that he’s brought along with him and slams it down on his hand as hard as he can… with him screaming in pain of course, and Ryan just throwing him out of the chair and onto the floor now. A few of the girls run away after seeing what’s happened, but a few of them are seated right there, and they’re looking at what’s going on, and there’s Ryan, sitting on the guys chest now, and he just looks at him and says—do you remember this? (((it’s the bullet that two of his henchmen had given to Benecio as a sign of retribution if Stanley wasn’t able to pay back the money he owed…) And he takes that bullet and shoves it down his throat as deep as he can, and just as he pulls back the hammer to strike, he stops and takes the phone that the guy had asked one of the girls to use to call Ron Perlman…
There’s more, much-much more, so please be sure to watch it, if not for my pedantic review, then surely for Ryan and Carey’s sake… and Nicolas’ of course.
