While I enjoyed Refn's previous two features, Bronson and Valhalla Rising, something nagged at me about them both. One could accurately sum up Refn's style as "cool for cool's sake" (as a friend once did), and although it's difficult to deny the visceral thrill of Valhalla Rising's punk-rock Tarkovskian style, it gives the distinct impression of Refn as an enormously skilled cinematic fetishist. Like Kael said about Spielberg, he's a "born director"...but can he do more than entertain? Drive answers with an emphatic "Yes." Unlike those other two films, the roots of his new neon-noir lie in American genre movies, although Refn works not to contribute to the tradition, but gives an outsider's perspective. Ryan Gosling's unnamed protagonist works as a stuntman, performing car chases and crashes, while moonlighting as a getaway driver for faceless crooks. Most noir movies contain characters who define themselves by attitudes and personalities they've seen in the movies, but the Driver is different. He doesn't talk much, and therefore doesn't talk about movies, or go to them. He knows only the stunts, the crashes, the explosions, the violence; so when he meets a woman (Carey Mulligan) he's able to care about for the first time, his emotions are manifested in acts of gruesome violence - for which he finally has motivation. Some have criticized the choice of song which plays over the final shot as being too on-the-nose, I would say that the extreme ambiguity of what has gone before lends the song's lyrics ironic meaning.
Refn, while gifted, is a single-minded filmmaker, and so to go into an analysis of the film's various striking scenes and images would be largely redundant. I do want to mention, though, that while I was most looking forward to Albert Brooks' appearance as a brutish gangster (and he doesn't disappoint), my favorite performance in the film came from his partner, Ron Perlman, as the Jewish thug Nino. His long, toothy face fits perfectly in the surreal world of Refn's L.A., and his character more than any other (even Bryan Cranston's sympathetic Shannon) is tinged with real sadness and frustration, amplified by the intriguing distance with which Refn shoots his final scene.
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