Gus Van Sant’s latest takes seriousness deadly serious; Ryan Gosling delivers a dull Steve McQueen impersonation in the obvious Drive.
Restless
Directed by Gus Van Sant
All that keeps the death-infatuated Restless from being laughably dismissed like last year’s Charlie St. Cloud is that it’s signed by Gus Van Sant. No mere sentimentalist who would employ a tween heartthrob like Zac Efron, Van Sant specializes in serious gloom.
Gloom, along with Van Sant’s special element of sexual pathology, sets Restless apart from the typical two-hankie liebestod. Shy boy Enoch (Henry Hopper) meets whimsical, fatally ill bird-lover Annabel (Mia Wasikowska, Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, here wearing Mia Farrow’s pixie haircut from Rosemary’s Baby) and they muse on their sexual neutrality and the mystery of death. Together they visit cemeteries and crash funerals; both are bright and prone to brooding. She reveres Darwin (“single greatest idea man”) but is the opposite of a life force. After a close call, Annabel reports to Enoch “I’ve been dead for three minutes and you know what’s there? Nothing.”
Mia Wasikowska and Henry Hopper in Gus Van Sant’s Restless
Van Sant peddles Nothing while other tragic teen love stories usually sell romantic overload. It’s part of his hipster creed to cancel optimism and faith to muse on meaninglessness. In Restless, Van Sant emphasizes morbid whimsy, even employing Nico’s warbled elegy “The Fairest of Seasons.” (“Do I really have a hand in my forgetting?”) He shamelessly references the bombing of Nagasaki to justify teenage nihilism, and one shot lets Annabel’s bird book replace the Bible so this “naturalist” romance is actively, implicitly nihilistic. Their “romance” traces their individual lack of effect in society.
All this pessimistic calculation could maybe strike a chord with hopeless youth who feel misunderstood, even in a Lady Gaga world. But that would result in a freak hit—weirdly sanctioning Van Sant’s own grown-up Gaga hopelessness as in his very calculated Nicole Kidman hit To Die For, though, interestingly, not the formulaic Finding Forrester (Too gay. Too upbeat. Van Sant has learned his lesson.) No-fun Gus shows the kids doing variations on snow angels, imitating crime-scene body outlines—a boldly negative switch on the sprawled body outline of David Bowie’s Lodger album cover that was celebrated in Todd Graff’s joyous Bandslam.
Art photographer William Eggleston makes a cameo appearance in Restless as an X-ray tech, apparently just to authenticate Van Sant’s spare, elegant visual anatomization of soullessness. Restless contrives to turn Van Sant’s absurdly praised “Death Trilogy” (Gerry, Elephant and Last Days) into an ongoing series.
Drive
Directed by Nicolas Winding Refn
So many better movies echo throughout the wannabe thriller Drive—including bad movies, like the entire Michael Mann catalog—that the resonance nearly drowns out the film’s brazen imitation of one particularly good movie: Walter Hill’s 1978 The Driver.
That Ryan O’Neal film now becomes a Ryan Gosling vehicle—an immediate decline. Gosling plays a loner stuntman who does underworld transport for Jewish mobsters on Hollywood’s fringe. His jaded view of life is part of his alienated cool, warmed over by a single mother waitress (cry-baby Carey Mulligan) awaiting the arrival of her ex-con Latino boyfriend. Director Nicolas Winding Refn shows no sense of how classes and ethnicities mix in L.A. He prefers evoking the sleek, unreal, existential cool of film noir loners.
But Refn’s cinephilia is specious and imprecise, while Hill’s revisionist modernism uncannily updated the aesthetic and spiritual essence of both American and European noir (Anthony Mann as well as Jean-Pierre Melville) into an original, idiosyncratic vision. Hill’s The Driver wasn’t a thriller it was thrilling, featuring the best on-screen car chases to this day. Refn, infected by Mann, produces fake toughness, fake sentimentality and fake style.
Drive is so relentlessly inexpressive of the modern world that it’s often inadvertently comic. Not just when the inadequate Gosling drops his dull Steve McQueen impersonation and lets slip Mickey Rourke’s old smile, but especially when his laconic Old Boy routine clashes with a group of vicious old goats—Ron Perlman and especially Albert Brooks as hypersensitive machers. Brooks’ zany turn as a psychotic has the best dialogue (“It’s not bad timing, it’s bad luck”), but it’s not quite as zany as Refn’s mannerisms, which get hilarious during Gosling’s rampages, especially a hammer attack in front of nude, silicon-enhanced strippers who look on idly like the mannequins in Kubrick’s Korova Milk Bar.
Refn’s good facial videography and portentous thrumming music turns hardboiled storytelling into obviousness. The monotonous, derivative Drive should be retitled Drone.
