Surface judgements and the moral critic

Early in Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive, Ryan Gosling’s unnamed title character outlines his M.O.: “You give me a time and place, I give you a five minute window. Those five minutes I'm yours. Whatever goes down, I'm yours. Minute either side you're on your own.” The speech instantly states the Driver’s existential philosophy, and the following set-piece – a night-time car chase that begins in downtown Los Angeles and ends at LA’s Staple Centre car park – confirms his ease with action and non-violent action. It is a terrific sequence: tense, eloquent and – despite the potential difficulty of translating screenwriter Hossein Amini’s non-chronological staging of sequences onto the screen – coherently edited, as well. Cinematographer Newton Thomas Siegel (Three Kings, X-Men) gives LA a gloomy, but energetic look, filming the city’s grungier streets with very effective low-angles, point of view shots and minimal lighting techniques, courtesy of the production’s Arri Alexa digital camera.

Whilst it is a little disappointing that this pre-credit opening will turn out to be the finest sequence in the film, it is also not surprising that the film has been acclaimed in America and internationally. The Cannes Film Festival awarded the film its Best Director prize, whilst The Chicago Sun Times’ Roger Ebert, The Guardian/BBC’s Mark Kermode and Rope of Silicon’s Brad Brevet gave the film excellent reviews (with Mr. Brevet, in particular, suggesting that Drive is one of the best of the year). Whatever issues the film has (including the love story, which suffers because Carey Mulligan’s love interest and her on-screen child lack personality and dimension, and the fact that Driver’s M.O. does not mean a hell of a lot if the character is stabbing, shooting and drowning his enemies), Drive certainly has an intelligent filmmaker well versed in original visual composition.

It is intriguing, therefore, that the film – despite its acclaim – has also faced some negative reviews, which cited its violence and existentialism as “a muddle of ultraviolence, hypocrisy and stylistic preening.” New York critics David Edelstein and A.O. Scott suggested that it was trashy and stylistically derivative, and The Age’s Jim Schembri was concise, if not exactly eloquent, in his 80-word review, with sound-bites that read more like Twitter comments than film criticism: “People get shot, blood spurts everywhere, he slowly loses control. Yawn... Directed without much of a clue by Nicolas Winding Refn” (I was a little disappointed when “Albert Brooks as a baddie? WTF? LOL, guys” did not pop up).

More curious, though, is the way in which some of the critics have objected morally to the film. The Chicago Tribune’s Michael Phillips liked the film’s opening, suggesting that it “is one of the more gripping openings of the year.” However, the writer did not appreciate the film’s later evolution into Gaspar Noé-style violence: “Refn has a compositional eye and considerable craft, as was clear in the earlier Bronson. He’s also a bit of an airhead when it comes to the moral implications of the brutality he portrays.”

Mr. Phillips' review is problematic, not least because he does not define the “moral implications” of the film or the moral obligations of the filmmaker, in any case. In particular, the violence in Drive never struck me as morally ambiguous or “preening,” at all. As a rule, I quite like Phillips as a writer. Whatever he lacks in talent in his prose, he more than makes up for with his logic and coherence as a writer: certainly, his thinking is often a lot more clear-headed than Mr. Scott’s tedious ‘writer-ness’ (the comment “this does not strike me as entirely an accident, or a wayward interpretation on my part” means nothing when the writer shows little evidence of self-reflection in later paragraphs) or David Denby’s frustrating pretension (it is difficult to stomach his assertions of Quentin Tarantino’s insensitivity in Inglourious Basterds when The New Yorker critic wrote “one of the extraordinary things about growing up French is that you can be absurd without ever quite knowing it” of French-language filmmaker Catherine Breillat).

However, the amoral violence that Mr. Phillips suggests is not apparent in Refn’s film. In contrast, the screenplay and direction depicts the violence as horrible, bloody and very, very disturbing. In one scene, the Gosling character stomps on another character’s head to the horror of the Mulligan character, Irene. In his screenplay, Mr. Amini describes as thus: “Driver turns to Irene as they take cover behind a pillar. She looks terrified – not just of Tan Suit but of him. It's as if all her worst fears have been confirmed... Driver stands there, his hands covered in Tan Suit's blood. The elevator doors finally close, hiding Irene from view.” In terms of Mr. Refn’s choreography and Mr. Amini’s narrative, the sequence suggests the physical and emotional toll of violence. Visually, the sequence shows the disturbing physical toll of the violence upon the victim, Tan Suit. Inspired by French filmmaker Noé (whom the filmmakers consulted in relation to this sequence), the moment shows violence and its physical consequence, intercutting the Driver’s blows with the man’s bloodied, deformed face and Irene’s shocked face. Narratively, the moment also signifies the disconnection between the Driver and Irene, who witnesses his capacity for violence for the first time. The Driver is trying to protect and care for her and her son, but – in committing such violence, even if it is in self-defence – he becomes the kind of man that she could never love. In this instance, he is not rewarded for his violence, but punished. Or, as Script Shadow’s Carson Reeves suggests, “And of course, we see that he cares so much for this family, that he actually puts his own life in danger to help the husband pay back the money he owes, so the family will be safe. That's another thing I loved about this script so much. There were so many layers going on. You're saving the two people you love, but in the process you're creating a scenario where those two people can never be yours.”

If Phillips’ discussion is shallow and problematic, it does bring up the issue of film criticism, and the propensity of critics to impose superficial moral judgements upon readers and viewers. In ‘Conversations with Pauline Kael’ – a fine collection of articles and interview transcripts with the late New Yorker critic – the venerable reviewer talks about the William Friedkin serial killer thriller Cruising. In the article by Sheila Benson, Ms. Kael talks about the film’s controversial reception: “Very often they take the surface attitudes of the movie and don’t go beneath that.” In the review, Mr Phillips does cite a particular example in Drive, writing that “the imagery politely points your attention to how the blood on the wallpaper contrasts with the green of the palm tree outside, against the blue sky,” but he refuses to define the way in which Mr. Refn “politely points your attention” visually, making it difficult to judge the likeliness or credibility of the critic’s suggestion.

Ideology is as expected on a writer as fingers and a pair of thumbs, and many film critics have significant political ideologies that are obvious in a number of their reviews. Ms. Kael was certainly not above her own moral and political convictions. In her review of Don Siegel’s now-seminal cop thriller Dirty Harry, she famously recalls at the film’s violence and glamorisation of conservative crime-fighting techniques with left-wing aggression: “the action genre has always had a fascist potential, and it surfaces in this movie.” Other critics have pet peeves, too. On At the Movies, David Stratton recoiled at The Book of Eli for its Christian concerns (in his recent review of Vera Farmiga’s Christian-focused Higher Ground, he admitted that “the subject matter really didn't interest me very much and you know how it is sometimes when you're watching a film and you feel quite remote from what's going on” and criticised that it was “barely critical” of the community). His ABC partner Margaret Pomeranz struggles with films that reduce the role of the female, which may account for her tepid reviews of the later films by Woody Allen (to be fair, though, in the cases of Melinda and Melinda and Scoop, she may have been perturbed by the clumsy scripts and their clumsy constructions). Armond White despises films with nihilistic themes or a post-modern approach, which explains why he attacks films such as There Will Be Blood, Precious and Black Swan, and praises the likes of Norbit. Genre specialist Mark Kermode dislikes sexually explicit films which do not conform to genre, which explains his loathing of Stanley Kubrick’s strange and epileptic Eyes Wide Shut, but gives a pass to Basic Instinct 2, the second in a series that has a truly disturbing and aggressively violent relationship between sexuality and sexual identity, but – regardless – deliver thriller conventions by the truckload (even if its does so incompetently).

In the case of Mr. Phillips and his criticism of Drive, his review is a little hard to stomach when there are far more dishonest and troubling depictions of on-screen violence, notably John Michael McDonagh’s The Guard, an unlikely and episodic comedy/action thriller that has some good (un-PC) gags, but ultimately and consistently reverts to the cultural stereotyping and violence-fetishism of any Dirty Harry film. In The Guard, Brendan Gleeson’s gleefully corrupt Irish copper annoys a FBI Agent played by Don Cheadle with his comic racism. The sidekick may be played by a well known, Oscar-nominated actor, but – honestly – how is the guy any different from any of Dirty Harry’s sidekicks, who suffer from the bigotry from the hero, but then grow to accept and respect the character’s unconventional, corrupt approach to crime fighting. Moreover, the film’s final action set-piece is weirdly unironic, too. For a film so divorced of action set pieces, the filmmaker goes gung ho, indulging in Sergio Leone’s influenced imagery and gun-worship in the way Mr. Cheadle’s buttoned-up American and Mr. Gleeson’s loveable Irishman unload on the drug dealers. Yet, try telling that to Phillips, who does not discuss the problems of gun-worship and violence in his review of The Guard, skimming over the sequence with “when the time comes for McDonagh's action climax the filmmaking comes up slightly short,” and preferring to reference Joel and Ethan Coen, John Millington Synge and Walter Matthau, instead (rather than John Wayne or any other Western motifs). In contrast to Mr. McDonagh’s work on The Guard, Edgar Wright treats the action set-pieces in Hot Fuzz as equal parts wish-fulfilment and satire, with super-cop Nick Angel’s victory transforming a sleepy, casually corrupt town into a quasi-fascist state in the film’s ironic coda: “Chief, we’ve had a report of some hippie-types messing with the recycling bins at the supermarket” (co-writer/actor Simon Pegg confirms this interpretation, “it was supposed to be, like, things aren’t as right as they look”).

Is it wrong for critics to object morally to a film? Of course, not. However, as Ms. Kael suggests, critics often look at the obvious, surface elements of a film and refuse to examine the material any further. Granted, this is not exactly the Daily Mail (in which columnists suggest that Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist “confirms our jihadist enemies’ view of us,” even though writer Christopher Hart had not seen it: “merely reading about Antichrist is stomach-turning, and enough to form a judgment”), but it is always tricky and difficult when film writers attempt to form moralistic judgements about cinema, especially when they attack the “surface attitudes of the movie and don’t go beneath that.”