This is Ryan Gosling at his finest. I have long thought his most defining characteristic, both as an actor and as a human, is understatement. In this story, the main character barely says anything throughout the entire movie yet you love him in the end. You bond with him. He is the hero. 

Drive is both fairy tale and morality tale. There’s our hero (the Driver), a damsel in distress (the woman he comes to love), and bad guys he has to fight off to protect her (the criminal underworld). To top it off, in all fairy tales I know, “the Prince” never has a name: Cinderella falls in love with “the Prince”, Sleeping Beauty is saved by “the Prince”, and Snow White falls in love with “the Prince”. It wasn’t until I got to the end of Drive that I thought “wait, did we ever get his name?”. No, we didn’t. 

But it’s as a morality tale that this movie comes into its own. No one needs another fairy tale. Instead, the Driver is like us: a study in contradictions, a being still becoming. No one is like “the Prince” of fairy tales: perfect, boring, and static. No, the Driver is a stylized version of us, writ large so we can see the complexities in unforgettable fashion. 

Like all of us, he thinks of himself as a good person. He wants to be good. And, yet, he’s not good all the time. About halfway through the movie you realize he must have a criminal past because no one could be that good at crime without having done it before. So, yeah, he’s kinda not good at all, brutally violent in fact, possibly psychotic. Or, wait. Is that the point? We are all a study in contradictions? He IS very good and very bad. 

The beating heart of this movie is the question: can you be a hero when you are deeply stained?

The movie answers this definitively, but let’s not jump ahead.

What we first learn about the Driver is that he’s a professional, albeit in the criminal world. He’s meticulous and in control. He’s impressive. And he’s the alpha male. But next, well, all the things that happen next written words can’t communicate. So, sorry my friend. You truly should watch this flick. It’s the music that takes over from here. And the night scenes. This is some of the most perfectly-chosen music I’ve ever experienced. The Director said fairy tales primarily evoke emotions. And that’s what this film knocks out of the park. Its plot line is not that interesting or complex. And while the Driver is a fascinating character, the rest are rather standard. Also no one watches this film for its action or spectacle; the budget was too low for that (thank God). No, instead, this movie does something far more challenging and worthwhile, which is to evoke a very specific emotion: dark, silent, empty, lonely, melancholy, pointless, brooding, and euphoric. Who knew 80’s synth could be so powerful?

What I just described is the Driver’s internal world. We realize very quickly that he’s lonely, empty, melancholy. He may be an alpha male, but his world is miserable. Next, the damsel appears and you see a smile on his face for the first time. They fall in love. In fact, he falls in love with her little boy as much as he does her. We get to see “the family man” version of this lonely, broken man who commits light crime.  

Their story is beautiful and it’s my favorite part of the movie. If you want a happy movie, watch only the first half. If you’re a typical male (sorry guys) watch the second half. It is brutally violent. And I still haven’t seen all the scenes – I refuse to put myself through that – I look away and I believe my life is better for that – but to each their own. 

The element that ties the first half of the movie to the second half is the jacket the Driver wears. Or more specifically it’s the scorpion on the jacket. The scorpion comes to have meaning towards the end when the Driver asks one of the criminals if he knows the tale of the scorpion and the frog. I hadn’t known the story. Fascinatingly, as a fairy tale, Drive actually pivots off of another fairy tale, that of the scorpion and the frog. While the Driver wants to be a good guy (the frog) he has not been able to escape his violent tendencies (the scorpion), and, well, what do scorpions do but sting? It’s in their nature. They can’t help it. Scorpions sting because they’re a scorpion, even when it’s to their detriment. It turns out, the Driver is a scorpion.

So, we see a needy, vulnerable man finding human warmth and then having his own violent nature (i.e. the scorpion) block him from experiencing any more of that warmth. He is his own greatest problem. It’s an inside job. (Don’t we all recognize this dilemma?) He goes to great lengths to protect the woman and boy he’s come to love only to have his violent nature, which she witnesses, push her away from him. We also experience a heartbreaking moment where he realizes, that, from the little boy’s perspective, he’s a bad guy.  

The Driver kills criminal after criminal to protect the family he wants to be part of. A regular Joe would have just called the cops. So a moral of the story is that the criminal world is insidious: once you’ve joined, you can’t leave. Since the Driver himself regularly commits light crimes, he couldn’t go to the police without possibly getting caught himself. (And, of course the plot line of this movie would be lame if he did that.) So think of this story as a thought experiment to explore a morally complex question. Does a wrong thing become right if done for the right reason? Can our brutally violent, and vulnerable, loving main character be a hero?

I don’t have an answer to that question but the movie unequivocally believes it does. The music towards the beginning and throughout the final, pivotal scene melodically belts out “a hero and a real human being”. You can’t miss it. Because he saved Irene and the boy, dumped the one million dollars on the ground, and sacrificed himself for them, he was a real hero. I would add that he became a real human being by finally experiencing human warmth: the scenes of him on the couch with the little boy watching cartoons, of him fixing Irene’s car, of them at the river throwing rocks in as the sun goes down, of him passionately kissing Irene (only once) are what life’s about. Connection and meaning were his for a short time. Then he drove off into the night, exactly as the movie started, without Irene and the boy, having sacrificed almost everything to protect them. The melancholy and the euphoria return.

A real hero. And a real human being.   

My rating: 10 out of 10

Other Reviews

The best video review I’ve seen is Nature Versus Desire In Drive. Please note that it contains a few scenes of brutal violence (which again, I refuse to watch).