ONLY GOD FORGIVES

Nicolas Winding Refn has made good films in the past. He made a great film with 2011's Drive, but it's no surprise that his new film Only God Forgives falters. Refn's style is so extreme and out there, that it was inevitable that he'd make at least one outrageous failure.

Ryan Gosling stars as Julian, a shy, reserved gangster who runs a Muay Thai kickboxing gym in Bangkok with his sadistic brother Billy (Tom Burke). One night Billy gets himself killed after raping a 16 year old prostitute. At this point Julian is obliged to go out and get revenge but can't quite work up any enthusiasm after hearing about his brother's crimes. This leads to the intervention of his mother (Kristian Scott Thomas), who we learn has a rather, um, Game of Thrones relationship with her sons. She comes in to hire a hit on Chang (Vithaya Pansringarm), the karaoke loving cop who ordered Billy's death and might be some sort of Daemon or something.

In interviews, Refn has talked up the film as a companion piece to Drive but the comparison is a poor one. Drive had a potent love story and thin characters rebelling against their own thinness in a very satisfying way, this film has nothing but its own style. Sure, Refn's depiction of Bangkok as a nightmarish, hallucinatory Hellscape is effective at times, but to what end? The film isn't really interested in anything other than wallowing in its own seediness and Kubrickian set pieces set to another one of Cliff Martinez's amazing synth scores. There's no meat here and it's very clear from the start that no matter how much it wants to do otherwise, Forgives isn't going to do anything but sit there. Even a climactic, and expertly constructed, fistfight fails to generate interest. The film is just too cold, too cromagnon in its approach. 

Even Gosling, America's foremost expert at saying nothing but communicating everything is a blank here. It's not his fault, as his character has no inner life and has nothing to do but sit on couches, flex his hands and occasionally terrify prostitutes. He doesn't play a character so much as he provides Refn with a life sized Ken doll to pose, same goes for all the other actors save Thomas whose self-consciously shrill, yet engaging performance is the best part of the film.

Strangely, the very same coldness that keeps the film from being good might also keep it off my worst of the year list. The film was booed at Cannes but I couldn’t muster up enough interest to hate the film that much. There are terrible, appalling elements here, the film isn't invested in them enough to appall me. The film is an utter failure, albeit one made by someone capable of doing so much better. The worst part of this film isn't its shallow use of weighty themes or the blank performances, it's watching talented people waste their talent.

Grade: D

DRIVE

He drives around at night a lot. He gets paid to do that, but you get the feeling that he'd do it anyway. He's a lonely man. So removed from humanity that he doesn't even get a name. The credits list him as Driver. Driver is played by Ryan Gosling (Crazy Stupid Love, The Notebook) who continues to remind us why he's one of the best actors working today. When we meet him, he's driving a getaway car. What follows is one of the most exciting car chases in recent memory. Unlike what we get in something like "Fast Five" it feels real. The movie seems to know how it feels to be pursued by the cops.

Driver is one of those 'By day, by night' types. By day he's a Hollywood stunt driver, rolling over cars and stuff. We know what he does at night. His handler for both jobs is a crusty, local mechanic named Shannon (Brian Cranston). Shannon is bit of a father figure to Driver, albeit an exploitative one, and sees a future for the kid as a stock car racer. Shannon gets a pair of his gangster pals to sponsor the car. The gangsters are played by Albert Brooks and Ron Perlman. They are an odd pairing, casting wise, but they work great together. Both are menacing but for different reasons.

Early in the film Driver befriends his neighbor Irine, played by Carry Mulligan. The romance that develops is not hot n' heavy. It's shy and tentative, almost chaste. But it's clear that she's bringing something out in him, something that's been hidden for perhaps his entire life. Unfortunately it gets put on hold when her baby-daddy, Standard (Oscar Isaac), is released from prison. In a lesser movie Standard would have been an abusive husband that Driver has to rescue her from. But thankfully, it's not a lesser movie. Standard and Driver become friends, in a way, and Driver offers to help him get out of his mob debt by helping out on a heist. The film heats up considerably from there.

This is a very stylish film. The car chases, while sparse, are utterly fantastic. The film looks great and director, Nicolas Winding Refn, is a master of visual storytelling. He wastes nothing. He doesn't load the film down with too much talking. Driver doesn't speak much, he just does things. As a presence, Gosling walks around like the reincarnation of James Dean or Alain Delon. He chews his toothpicks. He wears his white, scorpion jacket looking like a knight, or a superhero. Of course, he's not really a superhero, he's a man-child with anger issues. It is fitting then, that the jacket gets more and more bloodstained as the film goes on. We don't learn much about him. We don't know if he was born emotionally distant or if he was made that way by some past trauma. I vote for the past trauma. I think the key is a scene near the end where Driver goes to kill one of the main villains. Driver wears a latex-rubber mask he stole from his day job. It's such a dehumanizing mask that it doesn't feel like he's hiding his identity so much as he's building a wall between himself and the world.

I wrote in my review of Bronson that Nicolas Winding Refn would one day direct a great film. That day is here. The problem with Bronson was it's lack of thesis. This film has one in the form of a song, A Real Hero, which plays twice in the film. In Bronson, Refn kept his protagonist at arms length. Here, Driver is keeping the world at arms length, and like that song, he is left to wonder what it feels like to be "a real human being."

Grade: A+

CRAZY, STUPID, LOVE

Sometimes in life, and love, someone disappoints you. They turn out not how you thought they where. The new film Crazy, Stupid, Love is kind of like that. For two thirds of it's running time it is a wonderful, charming movie about the desperation and complications of love. About what happens when the honeymoon is over and what comes after. And for those two-thirds it’s a near classic. Then it goes off the rails in the third act and never really recovers. C’est la vie.

It's a real shame too, because it starts out so promisingly, with a charmingly conceived montage of feet. The feet belong to happy couples out on the town. Clad in Italian loafers or stilettos, slyly inching towards each other. The camera then settles on the feet of Cal (Steve Carell), his lived-in, New Balance sneakers peaking out from under his work slacks. His feet are decidedly not inching towards those of his wife Emily (Julianne Moore). Our suspicions on the status of their relationship are soon confirmed when Emily asks for a divorce and confesses to an affair with a co-worker. The sequence reminded me of the famous 'disillusionment of a marriage' montage from Citizen Kane and of the power juxtaposition has to suggest back story.

From there Crazy, Stupid, Love throws a lot of balls in the air. Cal's youngest son (Jonah Boo) is in love with his babysitter (Analeigh Tiption). The babysitter is in love with Cal. Emily’s Co-worker is in love with her and it’s not mutual. Oy vey! Cal moves out of the house and sits in a local bar night after night, until he catches the attention of the bar's resident pick-up artist Jacob (Ryan Gosling). Jacob feels sorry for him and vows to help Cal reinvent himself into a pick-up artist.

That character, Jacob, as well as that whole subplot, could have come off as seedy and uncomfortable. But Gosling plays Jacob with such wit and warmth that you forget that he's kind of a jerk. Carell and Gosling are a great comedic pair, and the script by Dan Fogelman gives them a lot to work with. The other gem of the film is Emma Stone who plays Hanna, the one girl immune to Jacobs charms. Eventually they go on a date. That date is easily the best thing in the film and one of the most charming sequences of recent memory. Gosling is great in this film, but Stone is the secret weapon.

Unfortunately the film has some serious problems too. Marisa Tomei is a fantastic actress, but the character she plays in this film strikes the wrong note entirely. She’s mean and shallow in a film where everyone else is reasonably decent. Also, the subplot between the kid and the babysitter is clumsy and at times gimmicky. As if the filmmakers treated the kid as a toy or a doll rather than a real person.

Then, there is this plot point, this twist which derails the whole film. It probably would have been fine, but the material after the twist is not as strong as what came before. Then there is the ending, it’s not a real ending, it just sort of runs out of steam. It’s as if the film could have continued but instead there is this artificial cap stone that feels contrived and really drags down the film. It is a shame because there is an ambition to this film, it does have a formula, but it tries (and nearly succeeds) to transcend it. Many Hollywood movies play it safe, so it's nice to one try to break out, and all the more frustrating when it falls short.

Grade: B-