Copyright © 2011 by James Clark
We first encounter the protagonist at home, attending to some business on the phone while looking out his apartment window as evening overtakes towers and groves of the city. On the TV, a basketball game between two of the less storied franchises—the Clippers and the Raptors—is in what could loosely be called progress. Then he is in his car, and damn if he doesn’t have that game on his radio! The LA announcer—perhaps an actor between jobs—gives the fantastical impression that it’s a vital playoff match. That aside, we’re struck by the Driver’s own game face, millions of light years from the Clippers and the Raptors. Now that he’s in the thick of the game he was joining at the window, namely, driving with total indifference a pair of professional thieves from their assignment point to the point of joining the innocents coming from watching the Clippers, we have to pause, first of all, on noticing that the kind of wide-eyed, silent impassivity and, at the same time, expectant strike of his athletic young man’s face and body, while moving at stratospheric speeds in a souped up “Plain Jane” Chevy Impala, and into very sharp turns, stops and pivots, is no different from how he looked when at home. Right from the start, therefore, we’re caught up in a full-court press complicating our understanding of the league (one of the breakaway moves, vis-a-vis police raptors thudding all around, is a cut behind a parked truck, followed by a veer to free space—a kind of pick and roll, in other words) this gamester finds himself occupying.
Part of the puzzle may be at hand in the nocturnal dynamics of the driver’s apparent occupation on the other side of the law. At a red light on an otherwise deserted intersection he calmly eyes a patrol car and listens, by way of a police-radio interceptor, to the opponent announcing to headquarters a plan to neutralize the suspect he has in view. With aliens in the back seat and aliens across the way, the vacuum thus established ignites a blaze of otherworldly manoeuvres (and otherworldly cosmic links, brought forward by the kind of video panache we’ve been treated to before, by Wong Kar Wai), punctuated by a search-beaming chopper, leaving the pursuit car a rolled-over wreck and the air force blindly feeling around for what has come to a serene stillness in the underground parking garage of the centre featuring extinct powers-that-were. (That nagging impotence doesn’t prevent—perhaps even drives on—the announcer referring to “The excitement and celebration of Clipper Nation!”) Leaving the dubious thrills palace, his pulled-down Clippers cap concealing his face, he strides past a cop and disappears into the night made noteworthy due to a rare home-town win, pulled out of the fire at the last moment.
From the perspective of that unique fluency with kinetic singularities, the rather unusual constant attitude of silent anticipation—eyes and mouth never varying by more than a fraction of a degree—traces to its groundedness somewhere very remote from the scoreboards and systems of mainstream LA. Trying to imagine where that set of excitements leaves him, we might infer that the stipulation of only giving five minutes to the escapee-clients (a warning he delivered on his phone as he stood breathing in LA and the burgeoning night) could have something to do with the thrills of the road not being enough to keep him where he needs to be, and, consequently, needing to be promptly replaced by other physical components. (“Less than a minute to go,” the announcer intones, as the Driver heads into his own home stretch.) After this glimpse of his arresting energies, the film runs the credits, and something else. There is a keening theme song of sorts, apparently sung by a school-age girl, whose lyrics can be summed up as, “There’s something inside you, / It’s hard to explain…/ There’s something inside you, / But you’re still the same.” This teen dream-guy cliché—wild, but a good mixer—touching upon the Driver’s bewildering range, gets trampled beyond recognition in the ensuing action. Though his eyes do project some gentleness, and, in the scene right after the song, he’s in the elevator with a pleasant-looking young neighbor (Irene) and her son (Benicio), coming from the laundry room of their far from deluxe building, and they exchange shy smiles, a scene later on with her, having to do with that same poky vehicle, gives us far more to think about. By this time he has, on her behalf, worked through another escape mission involving overtime vastly beyond the five-minute wrap-up, and both of them have been torn far from their cruising speed. Meeting in the hallway spanning their places, they touch upon her husband’s being one of many fatalities within that treachery-consumed project (featuring aliens with far less manners than the first ones we saw), and he offers her the bag full of money that he managed to come away with. She slaps his face and they exchange looks of desolation and love. He says, “You could get out of here… I would come with you… I would look after you…” When the elevator doors open at their floor there is a man who claims he’s mistakenly pressed the wrong floor. The Driver ushers her in, and it begins to descend. Sizing up the obviously armed stranger as yet another member of the group having become urgently hostile toward him, he pushes Irene to the wall and they kiss, convulsively. Thus disarmed, the opponent is not alert enough to avoid Driver’s pivoting from tumescence and beating him (with the would-be assailant’s own gun) to a bloody, unrecognizable pulp—brains, bones and blood spilling all over the vehicle. This scene brings to quite indelible lengths the matter of mixing the best with the worst. “There’s something inside you… It’s hard to explain” has, by this time, fully migrated from sameness that ensures married bliss.
Soon after that first encounter with Irene, he meets her and her little boy at a completely un-chic grocery store, the parking lot, to be exact, and helps her with the load. She asks what he does, and he refers first to a driving activity he’s revealingly most comfortable talking about, namely, doing car smash-up scenes for movies. (We had just seen him on the set, dressed as a cop, doubling for “the star,” and being told, “The director wants to see a roll-over… There’s no shame in bailing out.” Having watched him induce such an event from the LAPD, we’re pretty sure he can handle it. Of course, he does, and then the associate goes retro on us—“That was perfect!”—a sign, perhaps, that, though he could talk about it [typically, with a minimal word count], it’s far from getting on his highlights reel.) He does get around to admitting that his real job is car repairs at a garage run by one, Shannon, who later admits to Irene, perhaps half jokingly, that he’s been underpaying him for six years. Is it possible the Driver derives a hidden bonus from his high-quality problem-solving and craftsmanship? (During a noisy party at Irene’s to celebrate her husband’s release from prison, we see the more successful lawbreaker alone at home down the hall, absorbed with fixing a piece of machinery.) Inside the grotty little food store—named “Big 6 Market,” for six-cylinder lives—he has spotted Irene and the boy down an aisle, and backed away in uncharacteristic confusion (but perhaps in characteristic preservation of a hard-won equilibrium). In an aisle over from them, he hears the boy tell her, “I love you, Mom…” She replies, “I love you.” Driver’s face shows being uncharacteristically struck by that alien domestic drama. On taking a flyer on that pair, he offers to take them for a drive on the coming week-end. They speed along an almost dry, cemented waterway, and the guests are more than pleased. He has an unspoken affinity with Benicio’s sense of adventure, which, we can see, hasn’t before received this kind of disinterested attention. During a pause by a pond and its woods, they all enjoy its quiet beauty. At the end of the day, Driver carries the sleeping kid into Irene’s place and places him on his bed. On a subsequent, generally silent but attentive drive with Irene alone, she reaches over and grasps his hand. Then there is a drive when she tells him of her husband’s imminent release. That news coincides with stopping for a red light, and we are struck by the increase in complexity here, as compared with his face-off with the police car. During the party for her husband, who gives a journeyman little speech about having let them all down, that other fledgling in the rewards of mainstream world history toasts Irene for being such a dependable rock. His resolve upon probity soon eaten up, and elated that Driver will help him get on track, he waxes nostalgic with his family and new friend, about first meeting Irene. He introduced himself by name, “Standard Gabriel.” She replied to his Clipper-like over-reaching, with, “Where’s the Deluxe version?”
The Deluxe version (who had asked her, “You wanna see somethin’? in taking them for a joy-ride he would and could never convey in conversation about what he “does”) shows what he’s made of, by, against his better (canny) judgment, agreeing to Standard’s plea for help in paying off a debt to some organized—“organized,” as it turns out, along lines of Clippers professionalism—crime figures by robbing a pawn shop of a million dollar stash belonging to an East Coast Mafia family. His uncanny judgment comes into play regarding Irene and Benicio’s being under the consequence of death were Standard to fail. Unbeknown at this point, the prime Sicilian-Buster is “Nino” (a.k.a. “Izzy”)—a foul-mouthed hulk who seems to regard himself as global, meteorological bad news—as loosely directed by Bernie—an oily, sanctimonious, self-imagined professional (and collector of surgical knives), his last name, “Rose,” implying a devotion to first impressions’ meaning everything. Nino pointedly (in this film that lets us have it with teams and clans) takes umbrage with the remote colleagues from back East persistently referring to him and Bernie as “Kikes.” (Another version of clannishness [ludicrously prefigured by the announcer’s idea of “Clippers Nation”] darkening historical leeways is Standard’s Latino machismo from out of which he becomes as straitjacketed as Nino and Bernie and as adamant a bore besetting hearts attuned away from primitive missions. [Bernie only enthuses about a NASCAR venture insofar as how great it would have been having his name prominently displayed on the vehicle.] Standard’s speech refers to his good fortune in being given a “second chance;” but the societal strings attached to him ensure that that chance will not address the dynamics to which the Driver has become attentive. Driver meets a subdued Irene sitting on the floor in the hall outside her place, while the homecoming party booms on. She says, “Sorry for the noise. Hope it didn’t bother you.” He barely smiles but jokes, “I was going to call the cops.” She half-jokingly replies, “I wish you would.” Also a factor in this light is the Chinese restaurant, aptly [for this issue] named “The Great Wall,” which Bernie revered, particularly for its fortune cookies. At its parking lot Driver receives a setback, the upshot being a lonely kinetic effort to circumvent that Great Wall. Out of this palsied antiquity Bernie was pleased to inveigh, “Any dreams you may have had, must be put on hold.”) This pair of spoilers also have their hooks into Shannon and have begun a desultory venture of financing a NASCAR entry which the hidden-genius wheelman will drive, a prospect that, of course, doesn’t have him jumping up and down, but clearly plays into his strengths, always on the lookout for enhancement.
The thread comprising his high-risk solicitude for Irene and Benicio richly conveys subtle and complex, intimate and historical phenomena. As such, it requires traversing the narrative in close detail. We’ll get into gear with this, by noting the powers of the screenplay, the direction and the acting of the principals, Ryan Gosling and Carey Mulligan. Refn and his screenwriter, Hossein Amini (among whose adaptations is one as to Henry James’ The Wings of the Dove, hardly goon-fare), have fielded a rather astringent, neo-noir novella, by James Sallis, concerning a protagonist who relishes the anti-social aspects of his vocation as “getaway driver” for thieves, to bring before us a figure more in awe in face of a protractedly tepid world than caught up in resentment. The kinetic virtuosity he pursues on several fronts comes in for significant maturation. His dabbling with unforthcoming others migrates to his being suffused with adult caring for others deserving of love. (In the course of his troubled affair with Irene, Driver is approached by a former client about doing a second gig with him. He signals the change by telling the importunate entity that interrupted his diner-fare apple pie a la mode, “Shut your mouth, or I’ll kick your teeth down your throat.”)
Regarding Driver’s multi-faceted deftness or equilibrium being tested to the limit in the throes of violating that five-minute carom zone, as seamlessly presented by Gosling, let us, by way of the contrasting stand within a solitary adventurism, its pleasing swirl given apt edge and depth by frequent night-time glimpses of the lights of Los Angeles (often blurred as seen from moving vehicles), watch him when it was still easy to disinfect objects like Bernie. On first meeting that load of packaged distemper, at a motor race track where he has just demonstrated his driving skills, he hesitates to shake hands, finally coming up with the overtly lame excuse, “My hands are dirty.” Bernie snaps back, “So are mine,” and you can see from the way the handshake ensues that the driver is factoring out this acquaintance, notwithstanding a playable residue. (Feeling this, Bernie seeks to regain some dignity by refusing the subsequent bid by head-hunter and desperate money-grubber, Shannon, to shake hands in sealing the deal.) In the ensuant warfare, there are frequent stages of Driver’s coming to a halt in his comings and goings and attempting to regroup, particularly from bloody vengeance, but also from the horror of his isolation. Especially memorable is his catching up with an associate he would not have shaken hands with, who in fact had initiated a death threat toward Irene and the boy and who had executed a double cross with a view to killing the Driver. Having put onstream a torrent of blood, the latter catches up with the weasel (called “Cook,” for his penchant for spicy preparations) at a strip-club dressing room, and with a hammer loudly snaps down the opponent’s hands and other body parts, in a context of needing to discover the source (Nino, as it happens) of the disturbance of his peace. The seductive fleshiness of the girls seated all around this mayhem, in a unified mood of bemusement and indifference, sends out a kind of scat motif as to the territory Driver has (temporarily) forsaken. His ultimate destination round the horn of Cook’s body is a spot between his eyes, which he finally arrives at, poising the bullet he had derived from Benicio’s being used as a signal that Standard’s family was hanging on a thin thread, and lining up the soiled tool to do unimaginable damage. Driver’s breath comes in short bursts and his hands shake as he pulls himself away from gratuitous savagery. Only half successful in curbing that turmoil, he settles for prying out some of Cook’s teeth and stuffing the bullet amidst the shredded gums.
Importantly complementing the Driver’s solo performances are those disclosing the dawning of love between him and Irene. The spareness of his caring for her and the boy gradually ignites her affection as shining from her remarkably warm smile. There is an early encounter, at his workplace, where he is pressed into driving them home, their car needing overnight repairs. He’s quietly pleased, and then remarks, as to his own vehicle being worked on, “I don’t have wheels… Can you wait for five minutes?” She, having already heard from his boss, Shannon, of his possessing a special gift for auto repairs and being a dedicated worker, bubbles with joy at his disarray. She’s smitten in so simple and candid a way that we’re instantly smitten by their getaway. The steady and modestly delicate drive of their jointly orbiting is most germane to his bid for mastery of the horrendous twister to come. Apropos of which, during the party, we see her putting on a brave face to conceal her disappointment with the status quo, and then being miles away in reflection, as cutting to Driver at home, also being miles away—and they somehow span those miles to touch each other.
The major charity event features teammates nearly as dismaying as the Raptors, and its unwinding gives us a much-needed additional slant on the pitfalls of interpersonal life. Ominous indeed is the Driver’s rote and tinny rendition of the “five-minute window,” as delivered to an incredulous Cook. The bad-ass recalcitrance of the latter—a coke-inspired elaboration of the flagrant foul Standard levelled at Driver in finding him in conversation with Irene when she should have been pouring drinks for his comeback (“I hear you been helpin’ out… Is that right? Is that right?”), and regarding which “Mommy’s friend” had motives for resisting retaliation—is noteworthy for compromising the easy rhythm of his non-standard fellow-feelings. Cook brow-beats Standard and the large center, Blanche, a woman with lovely features but lax maintenance; and then he turns to the walk-on and, in this game, not needed, point guard and unknown quantity, thinking to send him packing by scribbling out the payroll on his hand, and underlining that he gets not even a Gatorade. (“Fuck off,” is his welcome to the team.) Though unused to having such trash-talk to contend with, Driver stays pretty loose and, after stealing a black SUV, deposits Standard and Blanch at the appointed ratty strip mall in broad daylight. Then a big silver sedan rolls into place nearby, and he takes a deep breath and ponders all that unprepossessing property, and factors into it the distemper of a double-cross. Blanch comes out with the bag of loot—jiggling across the expanse of cement on platform heels like a wide-open, tippy-toes approach to a slam dunk—and crumples into the back seat, all legs, like a sloppy completion of a lay-up. Then Standard comes out, and shotgun blasts from the shop end his career. Driver, seeing that the silver giant nearby would be eager to gain possession, shoots the team bus out of the set-piece trap, and there ensues some summer-league improv through the nearby streets. After some bumping and sharp elbows from the Cooker, Driver gives the also-ran an unregistered move, inducing a game-ending roll. But that is far from a perfect conclusion. Back at his place, he gives Blanche a chance to explain what has just transpired (pushing her head into his mattress, and using the few, understated but adequate, words, “If you don’t tell me, I’ll hurt you”). Apprised of Cook’s presiding over a double-shift whereby a loose-cannon like Standard would be silenced (and also, perforce, the silent pest bumping Cook from the driver’s seat), Driver reflects upon his next move within this tangled web, while Blanche goes to the bathroom for cosmetic repairs in view of leading him to the lowlife to be retired. Unfortunately, pursuers (in his present mood understood to be merely from the sewers), learning from Blanche’s texting where he lives—while he had gone outside to touch base with Irene, finding from Benicio she was being questioned by the police—greatly add to her cosmetic distress, using shotguns to spread body parts all over the room. Driver uses his mattress as a shield, forces a turnover from one of the attackers, and loudly exterminates both of them, bringing the color scheme of the living room into line with that of the bathroom.
That would be already a grating overtime, but Driver has to kick his game up yet another notch while struggling to stay much more than a mere enforcer. It would seem his game plan going into double-overtime involves deriving a line of morphine from out of the deadly mayhem and gore. (He was far more unsettled by the killing of Standard than by the bloodbath at his apartment.) Having made a point, in former transactions, about never carrying a gun, he has come to see such weaponry in a new light. After the heated argument with Cook, he phones Nino and begins by telling him that he has the money that means so much to him. Nino begins his counter-attack by checking out the nature of Driver’s defence. “I don’t have any partners” is the information from the dark horse, which must appear to be tantamount to taking a desperate foul. “You’re not very good at this, are you?” is the cordial reply. At the parking lot of yet another strip mall—this one being where Nino pretends to manage a pizzeria—the Driver (in a smiley skin-head mask he’s lifted from the movie lot [the blood all over his silver satin racing jacket assumed by onlookers to be part of a film entertainment]) positions his A-team Impala and, with that blithe game-face beaming, he stalks the giant and his chauffer as they pull away toward the winning shot. Once on the highway, Driver uses all that overdrive to batter Nino’s showy but fragile sedan until it stalls. Then he shatters it over a seaside cliff and strolls down the slope to finish the play on briefly surviving Nino (being a raptor of some significant—if pointless—durability). That lesser crime-wave staggers from the wreckage and the grinning Clipper moves in to ice this dubiously decisive game, pursuing him into a roiling ocean. Nino having distinguished himself as the most annoying of opponents (even before hitting the road, he presents from his shop window-cum-Drive-In screen an obscene snippet where he’s laughing uproariously at the expense of a sorely-offended hooker), the scene changes before Driver actually dismantles him, leaving to the viewer’s imagination how the already appalling retribution could be escalated. (The protagonist had asked, while watching cartoons with Benicio, who could easily spot a bad guy because he was a shark, “Are you sure all sharks are bad?” His struggle to imbue actions with overriding love has shifted from coolly countering triviality to a far more self-lacerating aggressiveness.)
And we still have Bernie, the brains of that undertaking, really testing our patience by slipping into Shannon’s garage, halting the latter’s attempt to go on waivers (having compromised himself by giving Driver a glimpse of the petulant duo’s playbook) and slitting a major artery with surgical efficiency and bedside manners the likes of which can’t be learned, to wit, “Don’t worry… No pain… That’s it… It’s done…” Driver calls him and reports that Nino no longer feels a thing, and Bernie shifts the tension as if between two General Managers looking for a deal that will satisfy them both. “Hand over the money, and the girl is safe. They don’t know about her… But I can’t offer you the same. You’ll be looking over your shoulder for the rest of your life.” You have perhaps noticed in this negotiation a somewhat scrambled version of the gunman’s proposal for the husband dragging around an awkward level of liquidity, in No Country for Old Men. This conjunction begs contrasting the ways of the serial killers, and the ways of the lovers. And, now that we’re at it, who could miss the odd rendition of the doomed lovers at the edge of the sea, in Kiss Me Deadly (where flashy cars seem made to be wrecked), featuring Big Blast Nino and someone who not only does not love him but hovers near an abyss precluding care for all but a few of the planet’s inhabitants. Moreover, Driver’s smashing into the big black vehicle has to send us back to the mishap (involving grinning idiots [tracing back to Blow-Up’s fatuous hippies]) with Rita’s big black limo in Mulholland Drive, and the inviting slope overlooking the City of Angels. We’ll soon do a post-game wrap-up about this wrinkle, but let’s go on to see where the showdown of the GM’s leaves the guise of a killing machine the Driver has suited up in, all the while (with the exception of the mask-time) training his facial and body language upon another career. On putting into play the bag of money, Driver is stabbed from behind by Bernie, forces a turnover of the collector’s item, more effectively stabs his colleague and, bleeding from his gut, drives away, leaving the money with the pain-free Rose, as promised. Irene knocks at Driver’s door, and then she turns away.
As the final credits roll, a song plays over them, on the subject of attaining to “human being” and a “real hero.” Those terms spring so easily to one’s lips; but the viscosity of social existence renders them unfathomable. Driver has retained the expectancy of his game face, even as he tries to drive into a territory that might contain nothing gratifying from the realms of “still the same.” But the anticipatory cast of his presence entails “something inside you… hard to explain” (a problem for paeans to “human being” and a “real hero” wailing away so bemusingly at the end, and an even more effusive musical simplism, with lyrics, “… a bright day/ When all this shadow will fall away”). The “drive” identifying him (the dynamic sufficiency) is a career of love for and from the imperative of motion he plays so adroitly. Its observance lends to the Driver a laconic poise that comes to us as far more evolved than Standard models (Raptors and Clippers). The reflexive humanitarianism of the playlist comes in, thereby, for a reality check particularly disorienting in its widening the leeway for solitary proceedings. The volcanic violence, of Driver’s decimation of Rose’s world, ultimately has to do with the tempered sense in which such entities are not merely odious but a lower species, presumptuous, clan obsessed, having carved out a universe fuelled by scraps. The Driver is well-endowed to go it alone. But such alert individuality cannot leave it at that, having penetrated a field of paradox consisting of solitude’s sufficiency and insufficiency. His alienated solitude and orgy of assault are not “heroism,” but deadly and at the same time essential jeopardy of “human being” far different from sentimental escapism.
In coming to bear as “the Deluxe version,” Driver becomes a conductor of love for Irene. But it is his reconfiguring thereby, ever so slightly but ever so decisively, domestic normality which enables their constellation to shine with real promise. There is a scene where she and Benicio drop by the garage to leave their car for extended upgrading. Driver watches them and then amuses the boy with a game of “You blinked first,” while arrangements are completed, including the deal that he would ferry them home in his car. This passage happens to offer itself as a telling variant of the “This Magic Moment” scene taking place where Pete works and where he first beholds the super-cool Alice, bound, as it happens, for a comparable crisis and solitary ride along David Lynch’s Lost Highway. Refn and Amini have installed here a kinship in dynamic sizzle and its dilemmas of alienation, and they have proceeded to insinuate the increased viability of their sense of Deluxe. For all her raunchy smarts, Alice is never apt to get the hang of infiltrating the realm of the PTA. Irene is briefly shown on the job as a waitress in a family restaurant chain, and Mulligan, with her clipped blonde hair and low-profile recalls not only the studiously chipper blonde waitress in a similar place in Mulholland Drive, but Naomi Watts’ Betty, as visiting that place with Rita where both work toward getting a bead on a severely shaken normality. (Driver asks her about Standard’s being beaten up [Cook’s gambit with regard to his agreeing to play along], and she hastily covers it with, “drunk kids,” recalling the young junkies who shook up Rita.) During the introduction of Blanche, there are cuts back and forth between her and Irene, the point being that (over and above her being an old distraction of Standard’s) the two of them—real blonde Irene and manufactured red-head Blanche—are a take on incognito Rita and sometime-marginalized Betty/Diane, especially in their discovery of love. (Just after Standard’s death, we see Irene in bed caressing the dark locks of what we assume to be a distraught Benicio. The cut to a short while later, when Driver calls her, indicates the loved one was the woman who does some baby-sitting for her.) In this slight and volatile conjunction, Irene’s coming into Driver’s orbit traces a quite amazing quantum leap into discreetly deluxe historical action. Only Rita was up for what was implicit in her entreaty, “Go with me somewhere.” It’s something very new in the twenty-first century zone of Beauty and the Beast to have both parties so game. “You wanna see somethin’,” he asked. And she smiled and nodded yes.
The minefield of world history forecloses on Irene and the Driver’s bid for a legendary season. But their launch has prefigured other drives, and other films, in a league you could altogether miss, but shouldn’t.
