for this week’s ‘Tribune’ : DRIVE [4/10]; Venice Film Festival report (pt.1)
Drive
Director: Nicolas Winding Refn
Terrence Malick’s impenetrable Tree of Life might have taken the Palme d’Or at Cannes this year, but at least as big an impact was made on the Croisette by a rather more surprising candidate for the august trophy – Nicolas Winding Refn’s Los Angeles noir thriller Drive. Critics raved about this adaptation of James Sallis’s cult 2005 novel, starring Hollywood’s sensitive hunk-of-the-moment Ryan Gosling opposite Britain’s very own Carey Mulligan. Gosling’s character, referred to only as ‘The Kid’, juggles three interconnected lines of work: by day he’s a mechanic working for old-timer Shannon (Breaking Bad‘s Bryan Cranston) in a greasy garage; he also performs stunts for Hollywood movies – and, perhaps most lucratively of all, is one of the underworld’s most respected getaway drivers.
The Kid’s carefully-maintained air of cool professionalism comes under pressure, however, when a heist goes messily wrong – meanwhile his emotional reserve is challenged when he finds himself falling for Irene (Mulligan) a neighbour in his apartment-building, whose ex-jailbird husband Standard (Oscar Isaac) is himself involved in aforementioned heist-gone-awry.
Amid general critical hosannas, there has been the occasional muttering that fresh-faced Mulligan makes a somewhat unlikely wife of a small-time Los Angeles gangster. But there are much bigger problems with Drive, not the least of which is Mulligan’s co-star Gosling. ‘The Kid’ is a star-making role if ever there was one, the latest in the long line of cinema’s too-cool-for-school smooth criminals – Refn has clearly made careful study of the more iconic performances by Steve McQueen, for example, and the picture itself is on one level just the latest variation on Jean-Pierre Melville’s icily precise Alain Delon vehicle Le Samouraï (1967).
But rather than exuding quietly virile sex-appeal, Gosling’s Kid more often comes across as lobotomised or even zombified – his fastidious attention to every aspect of his appearance, from hair to skin to clothes to gloves, giving him the air of a smugly self-regarding, self-obsessed poseur rather than a man who might credibly carve out a niche among the criminal fraternity. There are actors who might have made this skimpily-written role work – Hollywood’s king of effortless cool, Timothy Olyphant, is 43 and a bit old to be playing any kind of ‘kid’, and 28-year-old Lucas Black, star of the best of the Fast and the Furious franchise, Tokyo Drift (2006) might have been ideal.
And whatever the faults of those crazily lucrative Fast/Furious pictures, they certainly don’t take themselves as offputtingly seriously as does Drive, an elaborate homage to the 1980s and 1990s Los Angeles epics by Michael Mann (Heat) and William Friedkin (To Live and Die in LA), right down to the hot-neon opening titles and slices of self-consciously cheesy synth-pop.
But while there are pleasures aplenty in Newton Thomas Sigel’s gleaming cinematography – especially the alluringly edgy night-town sequences – these only go so far. As someone remarks of a certain hot-rod, “This is just a shell – it’s what’s inside that counts.” And when push comes to shove, Drive takes a serious wrong turn into a third act notable for gratuitously gory violence – the kind of thing Refn got out of his system at the very start of his most recent outing, torpid Viking saga Valhalla Rising (2009) – which suggests The Kid isn’t so much dangerously volatile, as seriously psychotic (one whose moral ‘code’ clearly doesn’t include an aversion to knocking women around.)
It’s the kind of sophomoric excess one might expect from a Tarantino-fuelled debutant director – but this is Refn’s eighth feature, or ninth if we include his Miss Marple TV movie Nemesis from 2007. The Danish-born, Manhattan-raised 41-year-old (who, unsurprisingly given his geographical background, has never learned to drive a car himself) is a hard-working, versatile chap capable of working wonders on limited budgets – as best displayed by what remains his most satisfying picture to date, Bronson (2008).
But here he can’t do that much with Amini’s plodding, two-dimensional screenplay – interestingly, this is the first of Refn’s movies in which he doesn’t at least share a scriptwriting credit – and editor Mat Newman can’t inject the kind of thrilling pace he brought to the climactic episodes of last year’s Doctor Who series. Still, the Cannes attention – he won Best Director – seems likely to land Refn with a juicy blockbuster or two over the next couple of years, Hollywood seemingly reckoning they’ve stumbled across another Christopher Nolan. The concept of a film that can be both commercially viable and artistically notable is an irresistible one – and it should, in an ideal world, be Hollywood’s standard template. Just a pity, then, that Drive should so struggle to get out of first gear.
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68th Venice Film Festival
Report part one: Competition
The sense of a renaissance in British cinema gained further credibility in Venice this month, when four of the 23 films competing for the Golden Lion at the venerable Italian festival (August 30 – September 10) were UK productions. Two of them took home prizes: Michael Fassbender was widely regarded as a shoo-in for the Best Actor trophy for his performance as a Manhattan sex-addict in Steve McQueen’s Shame, a surprisingly conventional second feature for the sometime visual-artist after his rather edgier 2008 debut Hunger, in which Fassbender had memorably incarnated IRA martyr Bobby Sands.
But despite being named best in show by international critics’ organisation Fipresci, McQueen’s picture – which co-stars the ubiquitous Carey Mulligan, and premieres here at next month’s London Film Festival (see preview below) in advance of its January release, had to be content with just the one gong from the official judges.
The panel, headed by Darren Aronofsky – who took the Golden Lion in 2008 with The Wrestler – gave their highest accolade to veteran Russian auteur Aleksandr Sokurov (Russian Ark, The Sun, Alexandra) for his adaptation of Goethe’s Faust, with the runner-up ‘Jury Prize’ going to Italian immigration fable Terraferma by Emanuele Crialese (Respiro, Golden Door.)
Andrea Arnold’s radically austere, confrontationally non-traditional take on Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (UK release November 11), won the technical prize for Robbie Ryan’s lustrous digital cinematography – an eminently deserved accolade, as Arnold (amply confirming the promise of her widely-praised second feature Fish Tank) favours visuals over dialogue in her bracingly stark version of the oft-told romance set on the windy moors of nineteenth-century Yorkshire.
Many observers reckoned that Wuthering Heights‘s experimental-tinged audacity and originality deserved a more prestigious prize or two, but Best Director went to China’s little-known Shang-jun Cai for People Mountain People Sea, with Yorgos Lanthimos’s Alps (another bafflingly arch outing from Greece’s critically-adored Dogtooth provocateur) taking Best Screenplay. The Best Actress cup, to the surprise of absolutely no-one, ended up in the hands of Hong Kong’s 63-year-old thespian doyenne Deannie Ip – a highly successful pop singer in her time, making a triumphant return to the big screen after a full decade’s absence in Ann Hui’s overlong but quietly affecting tale of an ageing maid, A Simple Life.
That said, Wuthering Heights at least fared better with the jury than two high-profile British productions from foreign directors. David Cronenberg’s disappointingly undisturbing Freud-Jung drama A Dangerous Method (February 12) stars the currently ubiquitous Fassbender as Jung, opposite a very droll Viggo Mortensen as Freud. Keira Knightley’s energetic performance as a patient of both analysts who becomes a practitioner herself was overlooked by Aronofsky’s mob but may find greater favour with the Academy voters when the nominations are tallied next January.
And Gary Oldman can look forward to similar compensation for his minimalist turn as George Smiley in Swedish director Thomas Alfredson’s suitably dust-dry and dun-brown John Le Carré adaptation Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (released September 16). And while Oldman’s reserved subtlety occasionally edges close to mummified immobility – the shadow of Alec Guinness is never quite dispelled – the respected actor will surely obtain what would be, remarkably, his very first Oscar nomination (leaving Donald Sutherland, Mia Farrow, John Cusack, Michael Gambon and Jennifer Jason Leigh as the most eminent members of AMPAS’s salle des refusées.)
Somewhat disappointingly for an event which bills itself, rather pompously, not as a mere “film festival” but rather a “display of cinematic art,” literary adaptations abounded in competition at Venice this year: Wuthering Heights and Tinker Tailor from novels, A Dangerous Method from Christopher Hampton’s play A Talking Cure.
And on the other side of the Atlantic theatrical sources lay behind three Lion candidates: in his third film as a director George Clooney came a cropper when tackling contemporary US politics with The Ides of March (UK release October 28), while Roman Polanski didn’t quite manage to open out Yasmina Reza’s talky four-hander Carnage (UK release-date TBC) despite the strenuous efforts of a top-calibre cast headed by Kate Winslet (who even gets to projectile-vomit at one key juncture) and Christoph Waltz, the latter confirming, after a couple of recent big-budget mis-steps, that his Oscar-garlanded Inglourious Basterds breakthrough was certainly no fluke.
Carnage‘s eyecatching names on both sides of the camera will ensure it gets plenty of exposure in the world’s arthouses – it might lure in those sophisticated older audiences who prefer a night at the theatre rather than venturing into their local ‘fleapit.’ But prospects are sadly dicier for William Friedkin’s engagingly blood-spattered comedy-thriller Killer Joe, based on the Jim Thompson-flavoured, Texan-noir play by Tracy Letts (Pulitzer winner for the sprawling August: Osage County).
Taking a break from his more lucrative Hollywood rom-coms, Texas’s own Matthew McConaughey is a delight as the eponymous slow-talking cop-cum-hitman in what is just the latest of several comebacks for the septuagenarian Exorcist and French Connection director Friedkin, six years after his previous big-screen outing Bug (also based on a Letts play).
While undeniably amusing, Killer Joe – shot, like so many US independent productions these days, on high-definitional digital video – can’t quite shake the air of a straight-to-DVD project, though it’s one which, with its over-the-top characters, dialogue and situations, will perhaps go on to amass a devoted cult following in the years to come.
A similar fate may await Todd Solondz’s Dark Horse, yet another jaundiced peek into lives of not-so-quiet desperation – it revolves around the traumatic lovelife of a thirtysomething New Jersey sad-sack – from the writer/director still best known for his breakthrough movies Welcome To The Dollhouse (1995) and the controversy-stoking Happiness (1998). Solondz can make this kind of thing in his sleep, but while he may not be striking out any new territory his film does at least succeed within its relatively narrow ambitions – more than can be said for several higher-profile Lion competitors at Venice.
These include the fiercely topical but tonally messy Himizu by cultishly revered Japanese writer-director Sion Sono, in which the strifes of a resilient teenage schoolboy are somewhat opportunistically juxtaposed with the nation’s struggle to overcome this year’s devastating earthquake and tsunami.
The film won the Marcello Mastroianni Award for the most promising young actors – Shota Sometani, who’s 19 and looks it, as the crusading 14-year-old youngster, Fumi Nikaidô as his chatterbox, gratingly upbeat would-be girlfriend. One doesn’t have to be a flag-waving chauvinist, however, to regard Wuthering Heights‘ teenage newcomers Solomon Glave (the screen’s first black Heathcliff) and Shannon Beer (a rosy-cheeked Cathy) as rather more deserving of such high-profile recognition. Then again, there’s always the BAFTAs…
Next week: A survey of the more notable movies showing outside the main competition at Venice this year, including Whit Stillman’s long-awaited return with Damsels In Distress.
Neil Young
Neil Young