Nicolas Winding Refn’s latest movie, out now, is more than a car-chase genre flick, and there are superb performances in The Debt.
Drive
Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive looks for all the world like a car-chase movie. Don’t be fooled. It does open with one of the best car chases ever filmed, with Ryan Gosling’s Clint Eastwood-style hero-with-no-name character acting as a getaway driver for hire, chauffeuring a pair of petty crooks through the holes in a swiftly tightening police dragnet. Film-goers of just about any taste will enjoy this sequence, which avoids the usual clichés and instead presents Gosling’s driver as a master tactician, navigating the streets of LA the way a chess master navigates a board. It’s quite an opening gambit, but the implied suggestion that Refn is aiming for a simple genre story, albeit a superior one, is deceptive.
This is actually a movie about car-chase movies. It’s as tail-swallowingly self-referential as a Quentin Tarantino film, but I would estimate Refn’s natural audience at perhaps one-tenth of Tarantino’s, because his approach is an order of magnitude more abstract. His characters are not characters, they’re archetypes. His story is not a story, it’s a gallery of tropes. The more 1970s action films you’ve seen, the more fun you’ll have spotting the references, and the more sophisticated your sense of narrative rhythm, the more likely you are to enjoy the carefully unconventional use of film conventions.
“Sophisticated” is precisely the right word for Refn’s hyper-stylised sensibility, but it needs footnoting. I’m not intending to suggest that only cultural peasants will fail to enjoy Drive, or for that matter that the people who do enjoy it have over-refined palettes. I do notice that many of the critics who have embraced the film in the months since Refn’s Best Director win at Cannes had nothing but disdain for last year’s superhero semi-satire, Kick-Ass, though the two are equally well made, and in certain formal respects come close to being low-brow and high-brow versions of the same film. (Especially in their shock tactics deployment of extreme violence. Both scored an R18 from the New Zealand censors, and Drive, far more even than Kick-Ass, comes by the rating honestly.)
Gosling is impeccable in an essentially dull role; Carey Mulligan is just as good in the equally hollow part of the film’s pure-souled damsel in distress. There’s far more scope for fun in the ripe, foul-mouthed villains played by Ron Perlman and Albert Brooks, and fun the pair do have. Brooks, in particular, is an unexpected treat. If you’re happy to have your genre film expectations treated as pawns on Refn’s art film chessboard, and if you have a strong stomach, there’s a lot here to like. But anyone hoping for a smarter, hipper take on The Fast and the Furious is in for a rough ride.
DRIVE, directed by Nicolas Winding Refn. Click here for cinemas and times.
Speaking of Kick-Ass, I was startled to see the writing partners who produced its screenplay, Jane Goldman and Matthew Vaughn, also wrote The Debt, the extremely sober split-time-period espionage thriller from director John Madden (Shakespeare In Love). This is like discovering Lady Gaga has just written a tasteful adagio for a string quartet. And, in fact, the core sequences of The Debt do involve a quartet: three Israeli undercover agents and the former Nazi they have abducted. The setting is East Berlin, 1966, and adverse circumstances force the trio to keep their captive house-bound for far longer than they had planned. The pressure begins to tell.
The writing and direction are taut, intelligent and only go slightly astray in a misconceived and lurid ending. The chief pleasures, though, are the superb performances from Jessica Chastain (the breakout new talent of the year) and Marton Csokas, as two of the agents, and Jesper Christensen, as their prisoner. Sam Worthington, as the third agent, is the weak link, especially when he opens his mouth. (His constant struggle to mask his Australian accent is a lost cause.) Helen Mirren, as a much older version of Chastain’s character, is given less to work with, but still manages to shine.
THE DEBT, directed by John Madden. Click here for cinemas and times.
Click here for our interview with Helen Mirren.