Drive

Drive is confused.  Nevertheless, it works on the surface and provides an engrossing hour and a half at the movies.

Drive’s core story purports to be the parable of the turtle and the scorpion.  You know the story: Scorpion asks Turtle for a ride across the river.  Turtle says, “No.  When we’re halfway across, you’ll sting me.”  Scorpion replies, “Think about it: if I sting you, we both die.  What would be the point of that?”  Turtle sees Scorpion’s logic and tell him to climb aboard.  Halfway across the river, Scorpion stings Turtle.  As they’re both drowning, Turtle says, “Why did you sting me?”  Scorpion replies, “You knew what I was when you agreed to carry me.”

In the film, Ryan Gosling’s driver wears a satin jacket with a scorpion embroidered on the back.  Toward the end of the narrative, he tells one of his adversaries, “If you carry a scorpion, you’re going to get stung” (or something to that effect).  Problem is, his adversaries don’t even know who he is until it’s too late.  The parable doesn’t hold, because Drive’s real point is “don’t mess with scorpions.”

Ok, so something got lost between drafts.  Nevertheless, Drive succeeds because it features an interesting lead, supporting characters with surprising subtlety, and a sufficiently complex plot to keep us on our toes until the closing credits.

Ryan Gosling plays Driver, a character similar to Alain Delon’s Jef Costello in Le Samourai and George Clooney’s Jack in The American.  An introvert with a gift and a passion for his work, he says little and controls his face and body language.  This makes him a cool, yet blank, slate: a projection screen for the aspirations and/or desires of the audience.  When he notices the disturbingly skinny Carey Mulligan, he toys with making the single greatest mistake a character like him can make: he connects.  You probably think you know where this is going, and you may well be right.  However, it still works because Mulligan’s character isn’t just another damsel to distress.  She’s a fully realized human being, perhaps more fully realized than our protagonist; and so are the people to whom she’s connected, and to whom they’re connected.  Even the villains fascinate us with their back stories and their agendas, a fascination facilitated by remarkably unique, yet effective, casting.

Soon enough, these characters find themselves embroiled in a well-executed story of trust, doubt, and revelation that engages our imagination and helps us forget that we’ve seen this protagonist’s character arc before and we know how it’s going to end. 

The result? Though it’s little mixed up on its central parable, Drive delivers a tale well told in an immersive world.  You could do much, much worse.

The Best of 2010

WHAT I THOUGHT ABOUT WHAT I SAW - 2010

2010 has been another great year in movies.  Among the top three films on this year’s list, any one could have taken the top spot.  But #1 is so visionary, so refreshingly original, that I believe it is the best film of 2010.

#10:  Kick-Ass
   
Violent, vulgar, clever, and careful, Kick-Ass is an audacious and original take on the superhero genre.  You won’t see another film like it this year.
   
#9:  The Killer Inside Me
   
It takes great big stones to make a lurid, pulpy novel into a lurid, pulpy movie with world-class production values.  It takes even bigger stones to film its story in all its horror and expect an audience to stick with its antihero.  The Killer Inside Me gambles big and rakes in all the chips, delivering a compelling and disturbing story while establishing Casey Affleck as one of the most interesting young actors working in American film today.
   
#8:  The Secret of Kells
   
In this animated feature, young Brendan is a monk in an abbey/fortress in medieval Ireland.  Torn between the abbot who’s driven to ready for the next Viking attack and the illuminator who unleashes his genius, Brendan finds a magical ally deep in the woods.  The Secret of Kells reflects its milieu with a daring 2-D animation style that reflects the illuminated manuscripts in which Brendan finds his inspiration and his calling.  This film is beautiful and imaginative and delightful.  See it even if you don’t have kids.
   
#7:  The Other Guys
   
It’s hard to make a big budget action-comedy that’s actually funny.  The Other Guys, however, is funny all the way through to the end credits and it delivers on the big action set pieces and it works in a Yojimbo joke.  How many wide-release comedies can you name that work in a Yojimbo joke?  Look for clever supporting work from Michael Keaton, Eva Mendez, and Ron Riggle.
   
   
#6: Shutter Island
   
I define a gadget movie as a film that’s as much a puzzle as anything else, and Shutter Island is a terrific gadget movie.  This challenging and puzzling film features a deeply compelling and disturbing premise, and it comes through on it.  Scorsese orchestrates, shepherding knockout performances from Leonardo DiCaprio and Mark Ruffalo in a film that’s as gothic, creepy, compelling, and horrifying as anything I’ve seen this year. I need to see it again, and soon.
   
   
#5:  True Grit
   
True Grit is a no-nonsense, three act western featuring outstanding work from Jeff Bridges, Matt Damon, Barry Pepper, Josh Brolin, and especially young Hailee Steinfeld, as the heroine Mattie Ross.  The film is full of little moments that define and develop its characters and its world, and we get the sense of a picture whose every detail was carefully designed and executed.  This is as professional as the professional western gets.  John Huston would be proud.
   
#4:  The American
   
George Clooney plays Alain Delon playing a very bad man in hiding from some other very bad men in a film that feels more like a late ‘50s – early ‘60s French or Italian production than a modern American one.  I like Goerge Clooney.  I like Alain Delon.  I like French and Italian movies from the late ‘50s and early ‘60s.  And I can’t stop thinking about the sense of world-weariness, fear, isolation, and dread that comes through in nearly every scene of this criminally underappreciated film.
   
#3:  Black Swan
   
I challenge you to name a Darren Aronofsky film that doesn’t rank among the best releases of its year.  Black Swan, the latest in a line of Aronofsky masterpieces, will baffle you and scare you and challenge you and elevate you.  It’s filmmaking about high art that is, itself, high art – a film about a dancer in ‘Swan Lake’ that is, itself, a production of ‘Swan Lake.’  The film enraptured me in the moment, and I think about the sound and imagery of its emotional climax several times a day.  I suspect it will become as much a part of my touchstones of great filmmaking as the sand Kyuko Kishida’s body in Woman in the Dunes or Hugh Jackman in the bubble in Aronofsky’s The Fountain.  You must see this film.
   
#2:  Winter’s Bone
   
Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence) sprang from the same soil as Mattie Ross, and I think Mattie would see her as one of her own.  When Ree sets out to find her father in the moral and economic wasteland of meth-corrupted Arkansas, she’s in territory as strange and dangerous as the Indian country Mattie penetrates to find her fugitive.  While Mattie had help, however, Ree is alone.  She alone must find her father, dead or alive, so to save the pathetic home in which she’s raising her younger siblings.  She alone must brave the suspicion, the fear, the hostility she meets within her own family.  She must do it all, and Winter’s Bone takes us every step of the way, plunging us into the icy winter waters of its world and daring us to grab hold onto what we may find there.  Winter’s Bone is a perfectly executed, utterly horrifying film.  You must see it.
   
#1:  Scott Pilgrim vs. The World
   
Inventive, audacious, and infectiously fun, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is the best film of 2010.  The picture crosses from reality to fantasy and back again with delight and energy, immersing us in the mind of its hero so completely that we cease to care about the objectively real and happily ride along with him while he, well, while he works himself out.

Granted, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World isn't the first film to explore boundaries between fantasy and reality; neither is it the first to exist almost entirely in the head of its protagonist. The film recalls Michel Gondry's The Science of Sleep, which gave us a man-child protagonist whose fantasy world so thoroughly informs his connection with the real world that we cannot understand one without the other.  While Gondry's man-child seems cloying and stunted, however, director Edgar Wright here gives us a man-teen so bursting with geeky enthusiasm, so ready to take the step into actual adulthood, that we root for him instead of just wait for him to grow up.

Scott Pilgrim does this by evoking the Big Three of nerd culture: comic books, video games, and alt-indie rock.  It doesn't do it by just throwing references out there and hoping for a few lightbulbs to come on.  It does it by borrowing graphic references from comic books, co-opting the look and feel of video games from their 16-bit arcade heyday to their modern, hyperrealistic incarnations, and overwhelming the audience both with music and with unique visual depictions of music.  Scott Pilgrim doesn't just reference this culture or remind you of this culture: it immerses you in this culture.  As A.O. Scott wrote in the New York Times, "There are some movies about youth that just make you feel old, even if you aren’t. Scott Pilgrim vs. the World ... has the opposite effect." 

Bravo, Mr. Wright.  I can't wait to see what you do next.

The American

George Clooney is Alain Delon in The American.

Yes, his character’s name is Mr. Butterfly and his character is, well, American.  But this doesn’t feel like an American film.  It feels like a French or Italian film, a Le Samourai or Rififi.  And Clooney feels like an older Delon in it.  He has the looks, talent, and charisma of a bona fide movie star, and he’s finally getting old enough to be interesting.

The film is set in rural Italy, a small town called Castelvecchio where Clooney, a killer and a very bad man, hides after a job gone wrong.  It’s adapted from a book entitled A Very Private Gentleman; and Clooney is private, indeed.  He walks alone.  He dines alone.  He even screws alone, flatly declaring to his prostitute of choice that he’s there for his pleasure, not hers.  But the local priest takes an interest in him.  The prostitute takes an interest in him.  Soon, he’s not so private any more.  This can’t end well.

But enough of the plot teaser.  What you really need to know is that The American is a pleasure and a delight.  It is so wonderful to see a film that’s pitched toward adults for a change.  Yes, The American underlines things for an American audience that, perhaps, an Italian neorealist crime drama or a French noir might leave implied.  Nevertheless, here’s a film about grownups who react in grownup ways to grownup situations.  When the priest looks into Mr. Butterfly’s eyes and tells him that’s he’s empty, that he has nothing, we look into Clooney’s eyes and we see it.  When the spark of a soul begins to glow in those eyes, we see that too and the actor doesn’t need to sing in the rain to show it to us.

Yes, The American is for Americans.  There are chases and gunfights and nudity that I’d call superfluous if the actress under discussion wasn’t so statuesque that she could’ve made And God Created Woman.  But it isn’t all chases and gunfights and nudity.  Much of it concerns itself with the slow reawakening of a damned soul.  It’s fabulous, classic stuff.  Alain Delon would have been proud to star in it.