If you going to
pretend to be Steve McQueen or Clint Eastwood, two actors who revolutionised
cinema and invented cool, you better be good at it. Sadly Ryan Gosling is
nowhere near the mark in this noirish heist thriller where he does his best to say as little as possible, in the mistaken belief that this in some way
makes an iconic 'man with no name' performance.
Eastwood and McQueen
didn't say a lot, but never did you explicitly think 'ooh look at them, their
not saying very much are they'. You don't notice it as it doesn't get in the way, it just reinforces your perception of how cool those two iconic actors were. That's because they used other techniques like
facial expressions or moving or even camera work to express dialogue. They didn't
just stare into the middle distance like a man who has just embarked on a dark Ketamine trip.
With Ryan Gosling
you notice it immediately. His commitment to blankly staring means that scenes drag on silently in a completely unnatural manner and destroy the pace of the movie. If I
was his neighbour, played by Carey Mulligan, I would have kicked him out for being a total werido, not jump in a car with him for a day trip. Seriously Ryan, just have a conversation, say
something, anything. If you did there might be a chance we would know what was
going on.
But it is okay
because the plot, despite apparently being optioned from a book, is rudimentary
to say the least. Hitchcock talked
about making films that conned audiences into thinking they were watching a
different film. With this movie I was half hoping I was watching a different
film, but the plot device of Gosling becoming a racing driver dies a strange death halfway through and instead we watch him get reluctantly sucked back into crime by being unable to escape his getaway driver life.
This is as standard a plot as you can get which is unfortunate as the one dimensional characters are not exactly drenched in complexity to hold the movie together. Maybe if we spent less time watching Gosling staring there would have been more time for some character development. Hard to have a character driven drama when there aren't any.
Nicholas Winding Refn has a
certain style about his films and that is in full force here, beautiful moody atmospheric cinematography taking fantastic angles on shots. However the gratuitous violence
injected in the middle also grates, it is unnecessary and adds little other
than for gross out exploitation reasons. Sergio Leone never resorted to this, so I don't see why it is at all necessary here. Unless of course you are
interested in anatomically understanding what happens when you blow someone's
head off with a shotgun, this may not be the film for you.
If the benchmark of success is measured by replacing dialogue with staring then this film is the finest in
its genre. There hasn't been such a brilliant staring movie since the paint drying movie that some guy submitted to the BBFC in protest at their
classifications, so they would be forced to watch it for 12 hours.
The ending is
horrible as well, not the most fun I have had watching a film.
Comments