Two Cents is a Cinapse original column akin to a book club for films. The Cinapse team curates the series and contribute their “two cents” using a maximum of 200-400 words. Guest contributors and comments are encouraged, as are suggestions for future picks. Join us as we share our two cents on films we love, films we are curious about, and films we believe merit some discussion. Would you like to be a guest contributor or programmer for an upcoming Two Cents entry? Simply watch along with us and/or send your pitches or 200-400 word reviews to cinapse.twocents@gmail.com.
The Pick: Drive (2011)
The Team
Julian Singleton
Rewatching Drive was every bit the wonderful experience I hoped it’d be. It’s such a ruthlessly efficient crime picture, with Nicolas Winding Refn’s neon-soaked style managing to be audacious in its bold asceticism. Each of Drive’s major elements–its leads, its story, its fiendish flashes of violence–are reduced to bare essentials, with their strength maximized due to their limited time spared for them to make an impact. And of Drive’s disparate components, few hit harder or more memorably than Albert Brooks’ stoic, greyed gangster Bernie Rose.
Bernie spends Drive as much an enigmatic cipher as Ryan Gosling’s Driver. From his opening dealings with Bryan Cranston’s hapless, hopeful mechanic Shannon, Bernie wields a quiet, menacing power that few characters match up to. It’s reflected in Shannon’s genuflection and Nino’s (Ron Perlman) right-hand cavalierness. If you’re on Bernie’s good side, rest easy that he’ll open doors you never thought were possible; on a dime, though, his shark-toothed smile will turn you into chum for other underworld bottom feeders. Yet Brooks and Refn are wise to rarely let Bernie’s ferocity take the fore–always overshadowing it by a quid-pro-quo benevolence that weaponizes the affable charm of Brooks’ past performances in this series.
Even with such limited screen time, Brooks commands each of Refn and cinematographer Newton Thomas Siegel’s frames. He’s a bombastic titan in Miami Vice-style suits, quick with his wit and a straight razor. There’s a theatricality to him, but it never tips into caricature; instead, it amplifies his menace. In a film defined by its restraint, Brooks disrupts this meditative quiet with a performance pulsing with an aggressive American energy.
Somehow it makes perfect sense that he used to produce “European” schlocky adult action films in his earlier days, the kind of Euro-cinema Drive itself is liberally influenced by. With this backstory in mind, one can’t help but feel like Bernie represents the greater American movie machine staring down an art-house actioner like Drive. To Bernie, everything must be in service of him–his wealth, his ambitions, his temperament–or it’s a threat, with no gray area in between.
It’s paradoxically a perfect match for Nic Refn’s magnum opus of style-as-substance. In Drive’s feature length fetishization of surfaces and silence, Brooks is the rupture: brash, violent, and unforgettable. His presence doesn’t just deepen the film, but interrogates it. It’s a performance of extremes that, in turn, provokes us to look deeper beneath the surface of the neon demons onscreen.
Justin Harlan
I hadn’t rewatched this one in years. I remember think it was a badass film and not much else, unfortunately. Watching it again now, I was affirmed that it is indeed a badass film, but also was reminded just why. Of course, this begins with the performance of Ryan Gosling, but the ensemble cast around him is equally impressive, whether the limited screen time that Oscar Isaac maximizes, the complex lovable loser type character that Bryan Cranston plays, or an number of fantastic turns delivered by the wildly impressive cast. Even as a believer that Refn’s catalog is quite uneven and a non-fan of several of his films, this one remains a real standout.
Albert Brooks had certainly not been an area of my focus on my previous watch, but I focused on him a great deal during this watch. While he isn’t on screen nearly as much as Gosling, or even several others in the ensemble, he’s one of the film’s important pieces. He is believable and his character feels well grounded. At his core, the character is a bad person, but most of the folks in this world seem to be. Yet, we can understand his motivations and decisions as they are brought to life by Brooks.
I wasn’t able to participate in much of this month’s selections, but had to hop on to see where I stood these days on a film I remembered genuinely loving before. While I’m not sure if I love it as much on this second watch (notably because I do struggle with Refn’s direction sometimes), it was a good way to get a little bit of Brooks in this month, all the while whetting my appetite for a month of Gosling flicks on Cinapse in the future, something I plan to pitch immediately after I finish this sentence.
Spencer Brickey
Drive has always sat in rarified air for me; specifically, as part of a collection of films that got me back into cinema in the early 2010’s. After spending most of high school not watching anything, I quickly found myself bored in a dorm room, with not much else to fill the time but watch movies (and drink, and smoke, and play video games, and essentially waste 4 years of my life. But, most of it was watching movies!).
I quickly found myself enamored with the new modern “synth noir” that was becoming popular at the time, with Drive probably being the most popular, but also including films like It Follows and The Guest. Revisiting it now, after what has to be at least half a decade, I think it’s held up incredibly well, able to meld its artistic flairs with its pulpier elements, with a sprinkle of grindhouse gore.
What really continues to work so well is the supporting cast. While Gosling puts on his best “man with no name” smolder throughout, the character actors around him are what really make this something special; be it Oscar Isaac playing a pitiful father trying to get out of a sinking situation, or Ron Pearlman as a hotheaded mafioso who bites off more than he can chew, or Bryan Cranston as a terminal dreamer who can’t seem to get one lucky break.
The real draw, though, is Albert Brooks, with an out-of-nowhere villain turn that is equal parts frightening and a bit sympathetic. Brooks plays Bernie Rose, a mafioso producer who stands as a kind of middle man between the crime world and the small slice of the film industry Gosling and Cranston exist within. Bernie is a man of high efficiency, but also a truly tired man; tired of dealing with the idiots in his life, and cleaning up all their messes. He doesn’t want to be the bad guy, but when he has to be, he’s the grim reaper himself.
Brooks is able to subvert his usual anxious self into something meaner, more lethal. While in his previous roles, his anxiety exploded into exasperated monologues and prat falls, here it manifests in stabbing and slicing, cutting through any problem he has with precise violence. There is nothing humorous about Brooks here. He is a fabled hitman of mafioso lore, causing brutal violence without a second thought.
Glad I got the chance to sit down and rewatch this, and really reaffirm how rad this one is. After a recent rewatch of The Guest last year, guess I have to do a rewatch of It Follows this October to see if my college year viewings still hold up!
Coming in August: SPIKE X DENZEL
In honor of their latest collaboration, Highest 2 Lowest, the Cinapse team is celebrating one of American Cinema’s greatest collaborative teams: Spike Lee and Denzel Washington. Join us by contacting our team or emailing cinapse.twocents@gmail.com, and be sure to catch Highest 2 Lowest in theaters August 22nd from A24 and Apple!
8/4: Mo’ Better Blues (Available on VOD)
8/11: Malcolm X (Available on VOD)
8/18: He Got Game (Available on VOD)
8/25: Inside Man (Available on VOD)
