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Wanted: More driving

It's the classic story: Boy meets girl. Boy falls for girl. Boy helps girl's newly paroled husband in "one last job". Hilarity ensues.

Well, not so much "hilarity" as much as "ultra-violence."

"Drive" follows <UNNAMED MYSTERIOUS CHARACTER> (Ryan Gosling), as he red-light-green-light's his way through a day job as a movie stunt driver/mechanic and a night job as an occasional wheelman for ne'er-do-wells. (Is he in the union? They don't say.) For such a busy guy, you only ever see him do these things once or twice.

The story is told in profiles of Ryan Gosling's face. Don't get me wrong, Steve McQueen made a career out of that. But whereas McQueen always looked like he was on the verge of punching someone, Gosling looks more like he'd rather hug it out. This actually works to the movie's advantage, given his character's true, uh, character.

He meet-cutes Irene (Carey Mulligan), conveniently his next-door neighbor. (I want to move to the part of LA where Carey Mulligan-types are my neighbor.) She has a kid whose Dad's in prison. A somewhat platonic courtship ensues between Irene and "Driver" (seriously, that's what the script calls him), until Papabear gets out of prison early. Then, one last job, man, just one last job. To be fair, the scene isn't played out with that level of triteness, but the meaning is the same. Stuff happens, let's keep it at that.

The movie fails to live up to the promise of its opening sequence, a frenetic blur of precision driving, moodily lit profiles, and incessant electronica (by Cliff Martinez, I bought the soundtrack the next day). After those few minutes, I was in. I was excited. I was ready for wherever this movie wanted to take me.

Then they had to ruin it with "plot". Oh, and exposition.

Oh god the exposition. For the half-hour after the opening sequence, the movie stutters and halts, while the characters effectively look at the screen and say: "Here's stuff you need to know! Ok, you get it now?"

Tragically, it's completely unnecessary. The main character's backstory is overtly unsaid, while the other characters' backstories are overtly blathered. It's not that you don't care about the characters, it's just by the time the movie gets around to explaining their history, you're already interested. It's the opposite of something like Ronin. You learn nothing about those characters from exposition, yet you know everything you need to know. Thank David Mamet for that.

For example in "Drive", Bryan Cranston's Shannon has a rigged-up gimpy leg. When another character makes a snide comment about it, Cranston replies "I paid my debt." Brilliant! Leave it there. So much said in a fantastic piece of pith. Twenty minutes or so later, it's explained. Nooooooooooooo! Way to ruin it. The sad thing is, the explanation is exactly what you figured it would be, and serves little purpose to flush out any character.

In addition to Ryan Gosling doing his best Kristen Stewart impression, there are myriad moments of silence where he and Carey Mulligan stare at each other. I have to figure Mulligan's script read: "LOOK CUTE AND PENSIVE," or "LOOK CUTE AND UPSET," or "LOOK CUTE AND ANGRY." Occasionally, it instructed "Say something in American." The funny thing is, she makes it work. She's likeable, and somewhat venerable, even when saying next to nothing. I have to figure her per-word salary must only be eclipsed by Kurt Russell's from "Soldier."

And Albert Brooks makes it work, pulling off a sinister villain type with a quiet menace I didn't think he had in him. So do Ron Perlman, Cranston, and Christina Hendricks.

That's the bizarre thing about this movie, despite all the awkward pacing, sporadic unnecessary cartoonish violence, and entire swaths of time where nothing happens, it remains watchable. Good even. As a fan of the car noir genre (is that a thing? Cause if not, TM GM 2011), it's disappointing because it could have been so much better. Also, more than two mediocre car chases would have been nice given the premise (the opening scene notwithstanding).

One word of warning, if you live in LA, or know it well, this movie takes absurd liberties with locations and distances. But I'll forgive the "driving in the LA river scene" because how can you have a movie about driving in LA without the ubiquitous "driving in the LA river scene?" Trust me, if it was legal to drive there everyone would do it. Less traffic.