By Erin Free
“I felt that it could be interesting to make the movie just like a fairytale, and tell it in the way that a fairytale is told, and using archetypes from these fairytales,” director Nicolas Winding Refn told FilmInk of his eye popping 2011 thriller, Drive. “So at night, Ryan Gosling’s character roams the countryside looking for someone to save. He’s the ultimate hero.” Only a filmmaker as perverse and unconventional as Danish-born Nicolas Winding Refn would consider the unnamed (the enigmatic moniker of Driver is the closest that he gets to a name) protagonist of his nocturnal, neon-washed instant cult classic as “the ultimate hero.” In this director’s world (he tracked drug dealers with his Pusher Trilogy, and painted a shocking portrait of England’s most notorious prisoner with Bronson), however, qualities like bravery and loyalty are to be cherished, even if they are counterbalanced by hair trigger violence, social awkwardness, and quietly simmering madness. That uneasy combination has made Driver one of the most compelling, original and utterly hypnotic movie characters in recent times.
When Ryan Gosling’s Driver first appears on screen with his leather racing gloves, toothpick, and scorpion-emblazoned silver jacket, he looks like a readymade movie rebel, the natural antecedent of Steve McQueen in Bullitt and Marlon Brando in The Wild One. His quiet, only-speak-when-it-matters demeanour, meanwhile, evokes the classic heroes of the American West, and his gentleness sets him apart all together. “It’s very pulp,” Refn told FilmInk of Drive. “It has these archetypes that come from noir – the silent hero. There’s also the samurai, who is a classic mythological hero. Here, he’s more of a cowboy.”
A Hollywood stuntman by day, and a getaway wheel-man by night, the lone wolf Driver has to shift the gears of his simple life when he meets young mother, Irene (Carey Mulligan), and then gets caught up with her ex-con husband, Standard (Oscar Isaac). Suddenly surrounded by hardcore criminals and threatened at every turn, Driver slowly starts to unravel, and begins sorting out his problems with hammers, shotguns, shower curtain rods, and anything else that might be at hand. Like Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver, he remains a knight trying to rescue a damsel in distress, but his shining armour gets more and more tarnished with every scene. It’s a brilliant performance from Ryan Gosling, and Driver is never less than magnetic. “Essentially, the movie is about a man who is psychotic,” says Refn. “But not in a bad way – he’s not psychopathic, he’s psychotic.” Driver is also instantly iconic – as Variety’s review pointed out upon the film’s release: “Come Halloween, don’t be surprised to see fans dressed as Driver, wearing a white satin racing jacket with a giant gold scorpion on the back.”
What an incredible character