Drive

Tonight we watched Nicolas Winding Refn’s 2011 ‘neo noir arthouse action crile thriller film’ (as the Wiki entry puts it),  Drive. The basic story, adopted from a James Sallis 2005 novel of the same name, is about a Hollywood stunt performer who moonlights as a getaway driver. Ryan Gosling plays the driver, who is both romantic knight and psychotic obsessive, and Carey Mulligan (we’ll definitely be seeing more of this lady on our screens) plays his next door neighbour (the love interest). The basic storyline, a heist gone wrong, is essentially a reworking of Chaucer’s Pardoner’s Tale, with its moral that radix malorem cupiditas est. Stylish, taut, extremely violent, claustrophobic, fatalistic, and yet open-ended, Drive is excellent entertainment and deserved the accolades it received.