It's hard to know exactly why animosity gathers around a given subject. At Cannes this May reactions ranged from " hypnotic art piece" to, ahem, " putrid atrocity." Even people who like the film a great deal seem slightly embarrassed. By the time the trailer for his new movie, The Neon Demon, hit social media, people had already started jeering. (And, in fairness, describing yourself as " punk rock in all its glam and vulgarity" is a risky move.) His last movie, the neon-swathed Bangkok anti-thriller Only God Forgives, was savaged by critics: "Just about the worst fucking thing I've ever seen," quoth David Edelstein, representatively.
His interviews are widely and intensely ridiculed. Between the mega-success of Drive and the arrival of its follow-up, Refn transitioned from a talent to watch to public enemy No. The ascendancy of Drive from Cannes premiere to mainstream breakthrough to cultural touchstone, however short-lived, seems to have had a significant effect on the cache of its director. As time goes on Drive may simply enter the "college canon," sitting alongside Donnie Darko and Fight Club as an inoffensive, entry-level art movie for cinephiles in training. Probably even its most fervent admirers will concede it's not the classic it once briefly seemed. In retrospect the whole thing feels pretty thin. The glossy panache that once made it appealing began to look chintzy, and what once seemed like an effort to undermine sensationalism now looks like sensationalism proper. Were they in the wrong, or did the aura of Drive - the music, the costumes, the title cards, the slowed-down machismo - dupe pop culture? I know many critics - myself included - who praised the movie quite rapturously when it was released but who have cooled on it somewhat in the five years since. Personally I'll always cherish having seen it opening weekend, when a man in the front row, fed up with a particularly languorous long take, shouted "Do something!" at Gosling's emotionless face on screen. Meanwhile Cinemascore, a polling house that measures audience satisfaction, lists Drive as a fairly pitiful C-, indicating that most people who saw the film hated it. So notoriously deceptive was the film's trailer that an American woman filed a lawsuit against FilmDistrict, the distributor, claiming to have been intentionally mislead. But the people drawn by and large weren't happy. But make it look like Noah Calhoun doing car chases and nobody is going to stay away.ĭrive made good money at the box office, considering its budget an ad campaign which emphasized romance and action evidently drew people in. Were people liable to flock to the cinema in droves for contemplative brooding and a few crushed skulls? Perhaps not. Like Spring Breakers two years later, Drive was seized upon by its distributor as an opportunity to smuggle an art movie into theaters under the guise of an energized Ryan Gosling vehicle.
And while many serious critics objected to the film precisely on the grounds of its slickness and superficiality, to ordinary moviegoers, it could hardly have seemed more demanding or dense - not least because it was marketed as a conventional thriller.
It seems almost sociopathically committed to putting people off. Drive is a $15 million slow-boil art-house drama by a pugnacious Danish auteur. Even the poster typeface seemed instantly iconic.Īll of which is rather odd. Ryan Gosling's Kenneth Anger-inspired satin scorpion jacket turned into a hipster fashion staple on the order of "Vote for Pedro" T-shirts, while Gosling's "Driver" was the unlikely Halloween costume of choice that October, happily for blond men everywhere. "Nightcall" and "A Real Hero" became ubiquitous practically overnight. The Johnny Jewel-curated soundtrack would prove to be the most influential movie-music record since Garden State. The film graced the MTV Movie Awards and the Teen Choice Awards (it lost Best Drama at the latter to the Nicholas Sparks movie The Lucky One). Drive managed, improbably, to reach arthouse escape velocity and penetrate the popular imagination. The enthusiasm wasn't limited to professionals.