A review of the DVD of Drive, starring Ryan Gosling

I just got the opportunity to watch the film, Drive, with Ryan Gosling. I remember reading the novel several years ago by James Sallis, but I can’t for the world tell you what it was about. I know the film got excellent reviews from a lot of critics when it first came out. I wanted to go see it, but things kept coming up so I finally waited for the DVD to arrive.

The movie was definitely worth the wait.

Made on a shoestring budget of 15 million dollars, the film stars Ryan Gosling as the Driver. That’s the only name we know him by—Driver. He’s a quiet man and doesn’t say much throughout the movie. He’s also the best driver in the business—stunt driving or crime.

He does both.

For a certain fee, he’ll drive the getaway car for you, giving you five minutes to get in and out. During those five minutes, he belongs to you. After the five minutes is over, anything is up for grabs.

Things are starting to look good for Driver. His mentor, the owner of the garage where he works part-time, has gotten an ex-film producer (Albert Brooks) to invest $300,000.00 dollars into getter Driver into the race-car circuit. Unfortunately, Driver gets hooked up with this woman (Casey Mulligan) who just so happens to live a few doors down from him. He falls heavily for her and her little boy. He wants to take care of them. The catch is she happens to be married and that her husband (Oscar Isaac) is in prison. The husband, however, gets out of jail early and from there on everything starts to go downhill for Driver.

I think there's a lesson here about getting involved.

The neighbor’s husband owes a bunch of men some protection money for keeping him alive in prison. The amount has risen from two thousand to twenty thousand dollars, and they now want him to pull an armed robbery for them. Driver agrees to help the husband if the guy’s will call it even-steven afterwards. The heist, of course, goes wrong and suddenly everyone is after Driver and the money that was taken. This is what the last half of the film is about. Nothing is as it seems, and nothing will turn out the way you hope.

Though Ryan Gosling does a fantastic job of playing Driver, the two performers who really shine are Casey Mulligan as the lady down the hall and Albert Brooks as the man who ends having the final say over Driver’s life. Both actors slip into their roles like a finely stitched glove, especially Albert Brooks, who’s generally known for his roles in comedy and dramas. He plays a magnificent villain, who wishes his partner (Ron Perlman) had just taken the money back and left Driver alone. Now he has to kill everyone involved to keep from being caught because his life is on the line, too.

The seedy side of Los Angeles plays a great role in this movie, too. You get to see a side of L.A. that's seldom shown in the movies, and it’s what most of Los Angeles really looks like, unless you have the money to live in the surrounding hills. Los Angeles isn't only the place where dreams are made, but also the place where dreams are shattered. It's also one of the richest cities in the world to be so poor.

The director, Nicolas Winding Refn, almost didn’t get the job, but thank God he did. He knew exactly how to shoot the film and how the characters needed to be portrayed. What he turned out was a grade A+ film that should have done double the business at the theaters when it came out during the fall of 2011. This is a class act, and it shows in every frame and in the special stunts.

I guess everybody had things to do with Christmas coming up.

The DVD has over an hour of behind-the-scenes extras. Surprisingly, Ryan Gosling is not interviewed, though the rest of the cast is. There’s also a long interview with the director on how everything came to be. That inteview alone is worth the price of admission.

This is an excellent addition to anyone’s movie collection. I have a feeling that Drive will soon be a true classic, much like Bullit is with Steve McQueen. Highly recommended.