My contempt for the Academy is quite long winded and would, if expressed verbally, come across as a volley of four letter words hellbent on taking whatever, if any, credit they might have still owned and dashing it against the rocks.
Why you ask?
Because the best damn movie I've seen in a dogs age was denied any true accolade. This is a movie I sank my teeth into, languished in, felt encompassed by. This was a film created for me, for people like me, people who still have faith in cinema. This was something on par with Cagney in Angels With Dirty Faces or Nicholson in The Shining. This was a magical, cut to the tendons moment in Hollywood history.
The film, if you didn't already know, is called Drive. It's an independent wonderland of tightly drawn expressions, shadowy criminals and broken hearts. It comes hammering out of the silence to a pulsating, 80's throwback beat. It drives, no pun intended, from open air location to closed off intimacy with the grace a slow motion gun shot. And when the bullet breaks skin, when the shit hits the fan, the gore and sinew pull you under like a low tide. And it works, every frame, every minimalist line. It all cohesively molds a diorama of sexual tension never consummated by more than a stare. It's a film all about not getting what you want...or what you need. It's about getting what you're given and dealing with it. That's why it works, why it manages to avoid cliche and why it sears its hero, cocooned in his scorpion jacket, into your brain. You feel his blood running through your veins. You know this guy.
It's everything a noir should be. It's the anti-thesis of the stupid car chase movie. You might think, from the opening seconds, that you're watching a car movie. You just might. But what you're seeing is a man that can never be free, never hold anything to call his own. He drives because forward movement with no destination is all he has, an endless road ahead, beset with snares and obstacle. He can't have a future. You want it for him. You can see it in the way Gosling and Mulligan tear one another part with nothing but a stare, a longing stare containing ample doses of emotional discourse that never finds an external means of reception. It's beautiful, valiantly stunning stuff. It kicked my ass. They just don't make stuff this good anymore...except this time, they did.
There's something to be said for Nicolas Winding Refn. He takes a script originally intended to be a disposable Hugh Jackman speed thriller and turns into a tour de force of art house cinema raping Steve MQueen car mythos. It all works. The looks shared between Mulligan and Gosling contain paragraphs of unwritten dialogue. That alone is Oscar worthy. There is a sexual tension there more palpable than anything cooked up in any romantic film this decade. And there's enough violence to give David Cronenberg a migraine. That violence is the anti-Tarantino...no gloss...no style....just magma sized chunks of blood and flesh poring off the screen. And for heavens sake, it isn't predictable.
And if you plan to ignore the Academy's recommendations this year, go rent it. Sit down with your beverage of choice, make no assumptions and get lost in the haze of LA. It's worth it.
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