Drive is one of those films that divides audiences. One half of the audience will be vomiting in disgust while the other half cheers and gives a standing ovation. Many people who have seen this film are baffled by many aspects of the movie—its 80s motif set in modern times, the pregnant pauses in conversation, the driver’s decision to drive off into the night after being stabbed, the font used (oh my, that neon pink script font!), etc.—and consequently, they do not like the film. I believe, of course, that those who did not enjoy the film because it baffled them did not take the time to try to understand these baffling elements. The odd choices made in this movie are what make it great and give it a uniqueness that is not normally seen in a heist thriller. Some people, of course, will dislike Drive merely because of their knee-jerk repulsed response to violence, but the movie is not gratuitously violent, nor is it glorifying violence. As such, I will be using this review mostly to correct the half of the audience that finds this movie repellent, to show that its baffling choices are not really so baffling when you understand what is trying to be said, and to show that the violence serves its purpose in characterization.
The plot of Drive is simple enough. The protagonist is the unnamed Driver, an introverted (but not shy) auto mechanic, getaway driver, and budding stock car driver. The Driver is introduced in the midst of a robbery in which he’s the wheelman. He is calm and collected, wearing a retro 80s style white jacket with a scorpion emblazoned on the back, listening to a basketball game and a police scanner simultaneously, a toothpick jutting from his mouth. What ensues is a strangely subdued police chase, seen almost entirely from inside the car from the Driver’s perspective, his eyes flashing in the rearview mirror. He uses the police scanner to monitor the location of police, pulling over and turning off the lights to avoid one cop, calmly driving under a bridge and parking to avoid a police helicopter, and finally easily outpacing a pursuing police car and pulling into a stadium where a basketball game has just ended to blend in with the crowd. No crashes. No explosions. And only brief accelerations of his souped up car.
From there, the movie goes on to introduce several potential plot developments. He meets a young woman, Irene, and her child Benicio (who live across the hall from him), seeming to develop a romantic attachment. Irene turns out to have a husband, named Standard, in prison, and he unexpectedly returns and initially seems untrusting and cold to Driver. Driver’s boss Shannon goes to Bernie, a mobster, to be loaned money for a stock car to allow Driver to compete in racing. A more brash and seemingly violent mobster, Nino, also seems to be involved with Shannon somehow. All of these disparate plot elements seem to foreshadow different possible outcomes. Will this be a story of Driver’s success as a stock car driver, or of his failure as a stock car driver and subsequent issues with the mob? Will it be a story about his romance between Irene, or a story of her jealous husband’s revenge against Driver? The plot takes an unexpected twist in tying these characters together, though. Instead of what appears to be a jealous rivalry between Driver and Standard, Irene’s husband, they become friends and eventually partners. Standard is forced into robbing a pawn shop to pay back his protection debts from prison. He enlists Driver’s help as a wheelman. However, the job is botched by double-crossings. Standard is shot and killed during the robbery. A car mysteriously shows up to the botched job and Driver manages to escape after a high speed chase. After Driver finds refuge in a motel and learns that they have stolen at least a million dollars, the one surviving accomplice reveals that the job was a set up, that the other car was going to rob Standard and Driver and leave them to take the blame for the initial robbery. Hit men find the motel at this point, however, and kill the accomplice, but Driver somehow manages to kill the hit men, dispatching one by stabbing him with a shower curtain rod and the other by using the dead man’s shotgun.
It turns out that the mobster Nino, and by proxy Bernie, were involved in the heist, and that the money they planned to steal belongs to a rival East Coast mob. Nino and Bernie have no other choice than to kill everyone who knows about the money at this point, including Driver, Irene and her son, and his boss Shannon. Driver, however, has the same strategy, and sets out to kill everyone involved to protect Irene. He tracks down Cook, the guy who gave Standard the job, and threatens him with a hammer (Cook is eventually killed by Bernie with a fork in the eye and a knife to the chest). In one memorable scene, he kills a hitman by visciously stomping his head on an elevator. Driver dispatches Nino by donning a strange rubber mask (used by stuntmen to resemble lead actors) and ramming Nino’s car off a cliff overlooking a beach, and then slowly walking toward the weakened and injured Nino to drown him in the ocean in a scene eerily reminiscent of something from a Friday the 13th or Halloween movie. Finally, Driver meets the last player, Bernie, and agrees to give him the money for Irene’s protection. Bernie, however, stabs Driver in the guts, but Driver strikes back and stabs Bernie back, killing him and leaving him dead in a parking lot with the bag full of money. In the end, Driver is shown driving away into the night, his hand bloodied, presumably driving to his death.
The ending has seemed to baffle viewers the most. Why does Driver simply drive off into the night after being stabbed? Why doesn’t he go to a hospital? The answer is fairly obvious. Driver is choosing to die. He is driving into the night both literally and figuratively, as he expects to die and knows this is what he must do to protect Irene and her child. He knows he will be hunted by the mob for the rest of his life, and they will go after those he cares about to get to him. His only choice is to die. He also knows that he can’t change himself; he can’t become a “real human being” (to echo the haunting music that plays as he drives off) except through death, because he is poisonous, violent. He is like a scorpion, and it is in his nature to destroy. When he calls Bernie, for example, to confront him and offer him the money, he asks Bernie if he knows the story of the frog and the scorpion, saying “Nino didn’t make it across the river.” That parable, however, isn’t just about the frog being stung by the scorpion and dying. The scorpion dies, too, poisoning the frog it relies on to cross the river and essentially dooming them both to drown. Thus, Driver knows he is going to die. He calls Irene one last time and tells her “I have to go somewhere and I don’t think I can come back,” and on one level he is talking about how he can’t come back from the violence he is about to inflict, while on another he is simply saying that he is probably going to die. Even his last meeting with Bernie shows that Driver expects to die. As he’s deciding whether to give Bernie the money, the movie flashes forward to Driver leading Bernie to the car and being stabbed, then flashes back to Driver making the decision in the restaurant, implying that he knows Bernie will try to kill him. This is an expert use of flashback and flashforward to show Driver’s state of mind.
In essence, Driver is allowing himself to die to protect Irene from himself. He realizes at the end that he can’t change his violent nature, that he’s a scorpion in disguise and he’ll end up stinging whoever tries to help him, even if it kills him in the process. At first, Driver believes he can change, that he can straighten up and become a stock car driver, that he can have a relationship with Irene, but this is all shown to be an unrealistic fantasy. The movie is full of allusions to this theme of his hidden nature, his inability to change, and so on. The scorpion jacket he wears is perhaps the most telling symbol. At first, the jacket simply looks ridiculous, like some sort of gaudy retro thing straight out of the 80s, perhaps a set costume from the Karate Kid movie or something. The scorpion on the back is just some silly design, benign and signifying only a sort of retro fashion sense. As the movie progresses, though, the jacket becomes more and more dirtied. First it becomes covered in dirt, then blood from the people killed around him, and then finally it is pierced and stained with his own blood. This silly jacket can’t hide the fact that Driver’s hands are dirty, that he is steeped in violence. At first he wears the jacket only at night, only during crimes, and by the end he’s wearing it in broad daylight, unable to conceal his true nature. The scorpion itself becomes less of a mere design element and more of an accurate portrayal of Driver’s character: he poisons those around him with self-destructive v
iolence; he lashes out at enemies not with guns but with piercing weapons—knives, hammers, shower curtains—like a scorpion’s stinger; he tells the parable of the scorpion and the frog, a parable in which the scorpion stings the frog and dooms itself, with the message that a scorpion’s violent nature can’t be changed.
In fact, this explains the symbolism behind another of the film’s more bizarre moments: Driver’s decision to wear a stunt double rubber mask during his murder of Nino. Obviously, the mask is a symbol of hiddenness. Driver is trying to hide his violent nature. The first person Driver kills is the hitman in the elevator. He does so in front of Irene, but he tries to soften the violence by preceding the violence with a slow-motion, prolonged kiss. He doesn’t want to expose Irene to this part of himself; he wants to prolong the goodness. The scene itself doesn’t rely on visuals to portray the bulk of the violence, as it is communicated mainly through sound, the sickening crack and squishing sound of an obliterated skull being stomped on, and the end result is only shown for a brief flash. So to kill Nino, his second murder, Driver wears a rubber stunt double mask in an attempt to hide his violent tendencies behind the mask (interestingly, the mask is as affectless as Driver’s real face), and rams Nino’s car off a cliff. This is why so much of the film’s cinematography shows Driver’s face only in reflections—in the rearview mirror, reflected off car windows, reflected in the mirror in Irene’s apartment, etc—because we’re not seeing the thing-in-itself, the person within…we’re seeing a mere reflection, an empty exterior, a mask. In the beginning, the Driver is given a nondescript, common car but is told it has been given a new high powered engine. The stock car that Shannon buys for him looks dingy and used, and Bernie explains this away by saying, “It’s just a shell. It’s the inside that counts.” Even the Driver’s cars hide behind a facade of normalcy, but underneath lurks high speeds, danger, violence.
With this motif of hidden natures in mind, all of Driver’s bizarre actions can be easily explained, and the choices made in the film can be explained in just the same way. For example, the movie relies on 80s style synth pop as music, a retro pink scripted font for the title credits, and presents what seems to be a standard cheesy 80s action flick. However, underneath this exterior of a cheesy 80s movie (not unlike those Bernie says he used to produce) is actually an art house film embedded with deep symbolism (and, perhaps, like one critic had said of Bernie’s “crap” movies, a “European” style). The retro look is no accident. It isn’t a movie that is set in the 80s but the budget didn’t allow for a full conversion to the world of the 80s. The look is designed to hide its ultra-violence, its modernity, behind nostalgia—in just the way that the Driver uses his cheesy, white jacket.
Driver is a man who is trying to redeem himself. To cleanse himself. To repair things. He is a criminal at night, but a repairman by day. His hands are dirty, but he doesn’t want to dirty other people’s hands. He is constantly seen tinkering with motor vehicle parts. He tries to let Irene and her son escape the depravity of LA by taking them to a hidden creek in the heart of the city, but he has to drive through an empty, barren waterway to do so. He goes to the auto repair shop to have his wounds stitched up. He associates his love interest with car repairs—he meets her when her car broke down, meets her again when she takes her car to his shop, goes on dates where they simply drive around in his car, holds her hand while resting his hand on his car’s stick shift—only to later realize love isn’t something you can fix up like a machine. He kills one hitman using a shower curtain rod, a device that implies hiddenness and cleanliness. He kills Nino in the ocean, trying to wash away his sins, wearing a mask normally associated with his perfectly legal day job as a stunt driver. He threatens Cook with a hammer, a tool of repair taken into the realm of violence. But in the end, he can’t repair himself. Even his legitimate actions are full of danger. In the first scene depicting him as a stunt driver, he is asked to sign a waiver in case he dies. And his job in the auto repair shop is only a front for providing cars for getaway services. There is no repairing or fixing his true nature, which is violent and poisonous.
In one particularly telling scene, Driver is sitting with Irene’s son, Benicio, watching cartoons (another way in which he tries to hide his subversions—by reverting to childishness, to a 1980s aesthetic that probably existed during his own childhood, to the long silences and cool introversion commonly seen in children, and Benicio himself, who aren’t burdened with the socially-constructed idea that they must be constantly speaking, etc.). The dialogue as they watch the cartoon says it all:
DRIVER: ““Is he a good guy?”
BENICIO: “No.”
DRIVER: “How can you tell?”
BENICIO: “Because he’s a shark.”
DRIVER: “There are no good sharks?”
BENICIO: “No. I mean, just look at him, does he look like a good guy to you?”
There are no good sharks, and there are no good scorpions. And if you look at Driver by the end of the movie—covered in blood and dirt—you can just look at him and know he’s a bad guy, and he knows the only way to redeem himself is not to try to change but to destroy himself.
The sad realization of the movie, however, seems to be that Irene and Benicio won’t be redeemed by the Driver killing himself after all, for they, too, have natures that can’t be changed. Irene has a tendency to surround herself with criminals and violence, in spite of her innocent exterior. She marries a man who is in prison for something “shameful.” When her husband describes meeting her for the first time, she admits she was only 17 at the time, prompting Standard to exclaim, “Wow, so it was illegal?” Even an innocent, romantic first meeting is seeped in crime (and it’s no coincidence that Standard affects a misleading, heavy latin accent when he meets her for the first time—more evidence of the theme of evil lurking behind facades). When Standard returns home and Irene throws a welcome home party for Standard, she is seen sitting outside in the hall when Driver exits his room. She apologizes for the noise from the party’s music, and he jokingly says he’ll call the cops. But Irene’s response seems a bit too serious when she says, “I wish you would.” This is a woman whose nature is to fall in love with the bad boy, the criminal, and Driver doesn’t seem to realize that his death won’t change that. Even worse, the movie seems to foreshadow Benicio’s growing up to become the second coming of the Driver: he is silent and introverted, but not shy, just like Driver; he tries to emulate Driver by taking a toothpick; he is constantly being draped in the white scorpion jacket as a blanket; he witnesses his dad being beaten, knows his dad has been killed by the end, and adopts a vacant, affectless demeanor like Driver. Benicio isn’t seen at all for the rest of the movie once the Driver goes on to seek violent revenge, and that’s because the child inside him has been killed. Just as the childish demeanor of Driver, in his 80s-era fashion and long pauses and simple speech patterns, are unraveled by his descent into violence. We also have to remember that Benicio is a product of his father, a convicted criminal. I don’t think Benicio is going to grow up to be a good guy. He’s going to be a shark.
Obviously, there is much in this movie that plays with the idea of whether we can change our true natures or hide them from others. In the end, the film seems to be saying that we can’t, but the best we can do is try to destroy ourselves if it is in our nature to destroy others. I also know that much of what I’ve taken from this movie isn’t what the writer or director probably intended. I’ve heard it said that there might be a sequel, and frankly I would be pissed off if they did that. So much in this movie points out the necessity of Driver’s death—if not the physical reality that being stabbed in the gut during the day and then driving until the night would entail enough blood loss to induce death, then at least the symbolism and dialogue should at least seal the Driver’s fate as a dead man.
Even if you don’t enjoy hunting around for symbolism in movies, Drive still offers a lot to the moviegoer. The use of sound is impeccable, from the crinkle of Driver’s leather gloves when he makes a fist, the cracking, squishing sounds that imply a stomped-in skull, to the use of cheesy-sounding, out-of-place music that somehow fits the mood perfectly. The visuals were also frequently stunning. I won’t soon forget the scene where Driver drowns Nino on the beach, with Driver approaching slowly in a rubber mask, the beach dark and beautiful and intermittently shot through with light from a quickly rotating lighthouse. I won’t forget the way love and violence were interestingly juxtaposed in the elevator scene, where you would expect a quick kiss followed by a slow-motion ass-kicking, but we are instead treated to a slow motion kiss followed by a largely unseen ass-kicking doled out in real time. I also enjoy the fact that this movie puts together so many plot points and doesn’t go where you’d expect at all, and still manages to tie up all those plot points at the end. So even if the choices made in the movie did baffle people, I still wonder how they could consider it a bad movie. It is beautifully shot and every scene serves its purpose. All I can say is that if you did not like Drive, you need to rewatch it, keeping in mind the theme of hiding one’s true nature, and you’ll see that so much of the cinematography, so much of the dialogue, and so many of the character choices perfectly fit with this theme, that the violence is necessary to underscore just how much has been hidden from the viewer by Driver’s benign appearance. Everything eventually makes sense if you simply take the time to try to understand. But who knows…maybe it’s just in your nature to not enjoy this movie.
