Yeah, Drive is probably my favorite of the year, but we'll see what it does upon rewatch. Still, I feel it kicks the living shit out of anything I've seen by Hill or Friedkin, probably even early Mann, to drop all the by-now requisite points of cinematic reference. Indeed the film is rife with homage, but it's far from a shallow stylistic exercise. Refn uses genre and allusion as another formal tool in this consummate mood piece and meditation on masculine will/psychological isolation. The film feels assembled with an almost Bressonian approach to storytelling and technique, and many of the calm driving sequences evoke a contradictory aura of stillness and movement not unlike that which Hou achieves in Goodbye South, Goodbye to continue to mindlessly name-drop. Gosling is the core of the film in nearly every way, its driving (hurr) identity, its id. He takes Ryan O'Neal's archetype from The Driver and elevates it to something considerably substantial. Maybe one of the most significant (to both an actor's career talents and to the vitality of the film in question) film performances I've seen in years. Also, the opening getaway sequence is mindblowingly well constructed, a sophisticated layered construction of space, movement, time and visual/aural communication of information. Hawwww shit.
to Michelle Williams in the Carey Mulligan role.
