I was too young to catch the late Muhammad Ali in his prime as a boxer and civil rights activist. So it wasn't until the 1996 release of When We Were Kings, Leon Gast and Taylor Hackford's Oscar-winning documentary about the lead-up to Ali's 1974 victory over George Foreman at the Rumble in the Jungle in Zaire, when I started to understand why from the '60s to the early '80s, the world was captivated by this former athlete whom teenage In Living Color viewers like myself knew only as a lethargic roach spray pitchman.
The nicely edited doc caused me to be won over by both Ali's sense of humor--which remained a part of his personality even during his weakened state due to Parkinson's disease, like when he pretended to doze off in the middle of David Frost's 2002 interview with him--and his activism, particularly the brave stand he took against the Vietnam War, which cost him his heavyweight title and his boxing license. He once amazingly said, "Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go 10,000 miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights? No, I'm not going 10,000 miles from home to help murder and burn another poor nation simply to continue the domination of white slave masters of the darker people the world over."
Also noteworthy for featuring "Rumble in the Jungle," a catchy original theme song that united the Fugees, Busta Rhymes and A Tribe Called Quest, one of whose members was another beloved African American figure who died this year, Phife Dawg (2016 can go fuck itself), the stirring When We Were Kings remains one of my favorite movies from the '90s. But When We Were Kings suffers from something San Francisco Bay Guardian columnist Johnny Ray Huston criticized Gast and Hackford for at the time of the doc's release--Huston was the only writer I saw point this out back then--and that flaw is devoting too much of its running time to George Plimpton and Norman Mailer doing what's known today as whitesplaining both Ali and a moment of worldwide black pride like the Rumble in the Jungle. Huston's attitude was like "Who gives a fuck what these old white men think, especially when a black perspective would be the perfect one to recall these moments?" He had a point there.
Gast's fascinating archival footage of the G.O.A.T. in his prime more beautifully conveys the speed, grace and brash personality of Ali than any of the talking-head segments Hackford shot in the '90s with Mailer, whose cringeworthy black guy voice while impersonating the boxing legend keeps reminding me of Wyatt Cenac's anecdote about how an improv session between him, another black comic and the late Robin Williams went from awesome to mildly uncomfortable when Williams started trotting out his clichéd black guy voice in front of them. Moments of interminable whitesplaining aside, When We Were Kings is a rare doc that deserves to be seen at least once in a theater with an audience, just to hear how other viewers react to Ali's one-liners, the trash-talking mind games he subjected his rivals to outside the ring and his rapport with his youngest fans.
While other heavyweight boxers at the time tended to be either glum or inarticulate, Ali knew how to charm a crowd. He was the ultimate boxer-as-rock-star. The 1997 theater audience I saw When We Were Kings with wound up cheering for Ali or enjoying his spontaneous antics as if it were 1974 again. That's how charismatic he was. The crowd gets turnt up even when it's just archival footage of him interacting with the press.
"I couldn't stand the Michael Mann film Ali starring Will Smith... The film's great flaw is the fact that no one can really play Muhammad Ali except for Muhammad Ali," wroteNation sports columnist Dave Zirin in 2013. "That is why Muhammad Ali has always been served better by documentaries than dramatic films."
(.GIF source: Muhammad Ali - The Greatest)
And that is why after Ali's death from respiratory problems last Friday, I marathoned for the rest of the weekend a bunch of docs about Ali instead of watching either Mann's beautifully shot but hugely flawed (and stolen by Jamie Foxx as Drew "Bundini" Brown) biopic on HBO Go or 1977's The Greatest, a much less beautifully shot and much more stilted biopic where Ali stars as himself, but, as Zirin noted, "it was a disaster precisely because the wicked improvisation that marked both his style of speech and boxing were [sic] thuddingly absent." Ali's passing makes you eager to revisit the real, unscripted Ali on film, not the Hollywood versions of Ali like Smith's faithful and respectful but also overly mopey (which isn't really Smith's fault--the mopiness is due to Mann's propensity for brooding and largely humorless male lead characters, outside of Dennis Farina on Crime Story and Al Pacino in Heat) recreation of Ali.
My marathoning of all these Ali docs I highly recommend has made me realize there will probably never be another sports figure as simultaneously entertaining and humane as the Greatest was (although he wasn't so humane towards the late Joe Frazier, calling him an Uncle Tom despite the fact that Frazier actually vouched for the reinstatement of Ali's boxing license, but we'll just consider that a rare slip-up by Ali). In the world of hoops, current Oakland hero Steph Curry could be another Ali, but it's too early to tell. And for a while, to us Filipino Americans, it looked like Manny Pacquiao was going to be our humble Pinoy superhero who would make us even more proud to be Filipino because of his heroism in the ring, but then Pacquiao had to open his mouth about same-sex marriage, and he went from being a kindly Ali type to the embarrassing drunk uncle at the merienda table who should really shut the fuck up about politics.
The boxing world, which is currently being eclipsed in popularity by MMA fighting (another sport that, like boxing, has just lost one of its black fighters: Kimbo Slice, the guy whom Tracy Morgan memorably said should be President Obama's Secretary of Defense on Late Night with Conan O'Brien), needs more humane Ali types and less ignorant types like Pacquiao. That's why Ali's passing is a huge loss for boxing. It's also a huge loss for Islam. It loses one of its most eloquent voices in terms of speaking out against the stereotyping of Muslims as terrorists, which has intensified again ever since Donald Drumpf started persecuting them as part of his Penguin-running-for-mayor-ish presidential campaign.
Ali's earlier allegiance to the Nation of Islam (an offshoot of traditional Islam) and the way that Ali's anti-war activism stemmed from his faith are deftly explored in director Bill Siegel's 2013 doc The Trials of Muhammad Ali, which is now streaming on Hulu. Zirin is right about the Siegel doc's ability to communicate with nuance Ali's journey of rebellion against racism and war. This is the film to see if you've always been curious about Ali's activist side, the allure Ali saw in the Nation of Islam (it provided the former Cassius Clay with a way to become empowered as a black man, right when he was starting to question both Eurocentricism and mainstream America's bizarre preferences for white over black in everything from Christianity to nursery rhymes) and the career sacrifices Ali made due to opting to be a conscientious objector.
From November 20, 2015, here's a repost of my discussion of the 1971 film Le Mans, the subject of Steve McQueen: The Man & Le Mans, an intriguing 2015 documentary that premiered on Showtime on March 18 and can currently be streamed by Showtime subscribers on Showtime Anytime.
With Le Mans, Steve McQueen, an auto racing enthusiast, set out to make as authentic an auto racing film as possible. The result, which was credited to a director from network TV, frequent '60s Mission: Impossible episode director Lee H. Katzin, was an unconventional, existentialist and documentary-style sports flick that baffled film critics in 1971--they wanted way more melodrama than the scant amount the film preferred to give them--and was ahead of its time. The story of an introverted man who doesn't know how to do anything else, except drive fast, was essentially a Michael Mann movie long before such a thing existed. And what are most Mann movies about? Introverted men who don't know how to do anything else, except break into vaults or track down criminals.
Le Mans isn't the best auto racing film ever made--that spot belongs to the offbeat Talladega Nights ("I like to think of Jesus as a figure skater who wears like a white outfit and he does interpretive ice dances of my life's journey"). But as an auto racing film, Le Mans is more powerful and rewatchable than either the soapy and overstuffed Grand Prix--if John Frankenheimer pared that film down to just the excellently shot racing sequences, it would have been an action masterpiece--or Quentin Tarantino's favorite racing film, the similarly soapy Days of Thunder, Don Simpson's 107-minute love letter to his own coke-fueled self. The power and rewatchability of Le Mans are mostly because of what Le Mans doesn't show and what it doesn't have the characters say.
The subplot about Michael Delaney, McQueen's racer character, and his tentative friendship with the widow (Elga Andersen) of a racing rival who died during one of Delaney's racing accidents barely qualifies as a love story, but the minimal dialogue between McQueen and Andersen and the details their scenes leave out (did Delaney and the widow sleep together in his trailer?) automatically cause their subplot to be far more intriguing as off-the-race-track material than any of the off-the-track Grand Prix scenes that don't feature ahotFrançoiseHardy or an equally hot Jessica Walter. I love how all the exposition in Le Mans is delivered by a barely audible PA announcer and the film--several decades before the invention of the closed captioning option on Blu-rays and DVDs would have made it easier--deliberately makes the audience work hard to understand what the announcer's saying.
I don't even like auto racing, yet Le Mans somehow comes up with many effective ways to make me give a shit about it, whether it's keeping the dialogue to a minimum, staging the racing sequences so that they're not the "disorienting, incoherent blur of mindless action" Nathan Rabin complained about in his Dissolvereassessment of Days of Thunder or capturing remarkable footage of either the actual 24-hour Le Mans race or the onlookers that would be impossible to capture today, perhaps for insurance reasons or simply because it's not 1970. It's hard to dislike a sports flick that comes up with a shot of a spectator like my favorite shot: a young lady is too passed out from drinking to bother to pay attention to Delaney's pit crew springing into action and assisting Delaney out of his Porsche at the end of his latest shift behind the wheel.
Behind the scenes, Le Mans was such a difficult film to make: it started filming without a script; the enigmatic McQueen was at his worst behavior and was at odds with everyone from studio execs to Le Mans' original director, John Sturges, who directed McQueen in The Magnificent Seven and The Great Escape; McQueen and his then-wife were cheating on each other; and a stunt driver had to have his leg amputated after an actual car crash on the set. The Le Mans shoot's endless troubles have been the subject of both a 1999 book (Michael Keyser's A French Kiss with Death) and now a documentary, Steve McQueen: The Man & Le Mans.
The Daily Beastcalls directors Gabriel Clarke and John McKenna's new McQueen doc "a warts-and-all portrait of a man at an unstable time in his life" and is appreciative of how the doc "doesn't look away from the people who were hurt by McQueen's actions." But the Beast isn't as enamored with the doc's overexplanatory nature, in comparison to Le Mans' not-so-explanatory nature ("We don't need to hear someone tell us that McQueen cared about where the camera was, or what shots he was going to be in, because to look at scenes from Le Mans is to immediately understand the artist's curiosity to capture action in images").
The best thing to come out of Steve McQueen: The Man & Le Mans has taken place outside the movie. That would be the bonus tracks on the Varèse Sarabande release of Jim Copperthwaite's ultra-solemn score to Clarke and McKenna's doc. The bonuses are highlights from Michel Legrand's occasionally treacly but otherwise vibrant and effective jazz score to Le Mans.
In 2007, Legrand's Le Mans score--it's basically Legrand in froufrou Thomas Crown Affair mode--was reissued with additional tracks by Universal France, but Varèse's treatment of the Le Mans cues isn't too shabby either. Fortunately, in this incarnation, the Le Mans cues are without the Le Mans race track sound FX that were edited into the music on the 1971 Columbia Records LP release of the Le Mans soundtrack (and then were mostly omitted by Universal France, to the delight of film score music fans who don't like hearing sound clips from movies during those movies' score albums).
"The Race, Final Laps" was cut out of the 1971 film, but it's the best and most energetic of the cues Legrand wrote for Le Mans and Varèse added to the Man & Le Mans album. It best captures Delaney's intense drive to get his team to the top, even when he himself isn't in first place, as well as the very subject of The Man & Le Mans: McQueen's ambition and desperation to make Le Mans the way he wanted, even at the cost of several friendships, a marriage, a guy's leg and perhaps his own sanity.
I've watched Beyoncé's Lemonade visual album only once, when HBO Go had the streaming rights to the visual album for just one day (I'm not a Tidal subscriber, and $9.99 a month is too steep for my blood--lower the price, Hov). Yet the sounds of Lemonade are still reverberating in my head.
The anthemic, Just Blaze-produced "Freedom" contains a typically superb Kendrick Lamar guest verse. "Hold Up," the Jack White contribution "Don't Hurt Yourself" and "Sorry" are a triptych of intriguing songs about coping with infidelity, and Beyoncé's jab at "Becky with the good hair" during "Sorry" makes me wonder if "Becky" isn't one lady but is actually a composite of several. I doubt Beyoncé's husband has had just one side chick since marrying Bey. "Daddy Lessons," a tune that explores both her Texan roots and her relationship with her estranged father (and former manager), is a rarity: a black country song, but this time from a woman instead of Charley Pride, Darius Rucker or Kool Moe Dee. Beyoncé experiments with country, but it's not an epic fail like that time Lil Wayne made a rock album.
I always thought Solange was the more musically interesting Knowles sister, and I still do, but with Lemonade, Beyoncé has really evolved from the "Independent Women"-style anthems and adult contemporary radio-friendly ballads she's known primarily for. I didn't expect something so introspective, confessional and politically charged from Beyoncé, although there have been hints of that introspective direction throughout her last visual album and during, of course, the #BlackLivesMatter-influenced "Formation" single (some say that direction surfaced as early as 2003's Dangerously in Love). Lemonade is basically Beyoncé's Craps (After Hours). In other words, it's the turning point for a new kind of Beyoncé. I believe I have a clip from her new visual album.
Occasionally on Friday, I discuss the week's best first-run animated series episode I saw. It's the "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week. Stream "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round," my one-hour mix of original score tracks from animated shows or movies, right now.
Two seasons ago, Archer's season-long experiment as "Archer Vice" was a divisive one for fans of the animated spy spoof. The viewers who disliked the kinds of storytelling that resulted from Archer creator Adam Reed's decision to change the characters' jobs from spies to drug dealers found the fifth season to be aimless, while I enjoyed Reed's willingness to experiment that season and found the subsequent season, in which the perpetually immature Archer, new mom Lana, Malory and Ray returned to spying and worked as independent contractors for the CIA, to be the more aimless season.
But as Archer has gotten older, the show's animators have developed a knack for crafting satisfying action sequences that have gotten more impressive in scale and scope with each year. That's mostly why my favorite episode from Archer's sixth season is "The Kanes." Lana's visit to her parents' house in Berkeley presented a great balance of large-scale action (the episode's homage to the classic Bullitt car chase was second to the avalanche in "The Archer Sanction" as an impressive sixth-season set piece) and the smaller-scale kind of character-based comedy that's pulled off well by bottle episodes like "Vision Quest."
A lot of the rest of Archer's sixth season suffered from a lack of stakes. Sure, the addition of a baby to the relationship between Archer and Lana brought a bit of welcome depth to the character of Archer, but Reed seemed to be sleepwalking through the same kinds of espionage storylines he appeared to be getting bored with shortly before the "Archer Vice" revamp. Archer's new season seeks to rectify the lack of stakes by changing the show's backdrop again to Hollywood and putting the disgraced (and after the disastrous events in "Drastic Voyage," unemployed) spies to work as private investigators. The P.I. storylines will hopefully restore some stakes to the show and allow for the animators to continue to outdo themselves in the action department, and if "The Figgis Agency," Archer's seventh-season premiere, is any indication, Archer's new detective agency may just turn out to be a better creative shot in the arm for the show than the cocaine-slinging thing.
Technically, it's Cyril's detective agency, and Archer, Lana and Ray are his unlicensed gumshoes, applying their spying skills to investigative work. So far, Archer isn't exactly Michael Westen yet. In "The Figgis Agency," he gets badly bitten by a couple of attack dogs in a scene that made me wince and is straight out of The Boys from Brazil, the same movie that inspired Krieger's possible origins as a Hitler clone. He also falls down the same canyon twice and fails to notice that Cyril's client (Ona Grauer, a.k.a. Bionic Katya), a movie star who hired the titular agency to retrieve a disk that's in the hands of powerful L.A. sleazebag Alan Shapiro (Patton Oswalt, who seems to be channeling both the villainous Henry Gibson and Mark Rydell characters from The Long Goodbye), is actually an imposter. It's like if all the spy tips that pulled Michael out of countless jams as a P.I. during Burn Notice went wrong.
Former Hannibal composer Brian Reitzell and the recently unretired Siouxsie Sioux (Photo source: EW.com)
Brian Reitzell's eerie score music from Bryan Fuller's now-defunct Hannibal is completely bonkers. It's largely non-melodic and is more like sound FX rather than traditional-sounding score music. Think the horror equivalent of Gil Melle's similarly creepy and non-melodic synth score from The Andromeda Strain, but performed with bronze percussion instruments or old-fashioned oddities like a Newton's cradle--which, as the Hannibal composer and music supervisor pointed out to interviewer Hrishikesh Hirway on 99% Invisible, was chosen to represent the synapses firing inside the brain of FBI profiler and "empathy disorder" sufferer Will Graham (Hugh Dancy)--and a bullroarer (a piece of wood on a string, spun around to produce a roaring noise and used in Aboriginal religious ceremonies).
During Reitzell's Hannibal score albums (the kind of score albums that are made to be listened to only on headphones in order to catch all the various intricacies of Reitzell's nifty soundscapes), you're more able to notice how bonkers the sound design in Reitzell's score music is because your attention isn't drawn to either the gruesome prosthetic makeup on Raúl Esparza as the disfigured Frederick Chilton or the shots of misshapen corpses in grisly crime scenes that look like art installations created by the world's most fucked-up sculptors. A couple of lengthy excerpts from the score albums for Hannibal's first two seasons (the nearly 12-minute "Trou Normand" and the eight-minute "Tome-wan") are currently in rotation on AFOS, and, like Reitzell once warned about his own music from Hannibal, they're "not something to play alone in the dark while driving!"
Brian Reitzell's score for HANNIBAL is the greatest TV scoring job since Angelo Badalamenti's TWIN PEAKS.
— Matt Zoller Seitz (@mattzollerseitz) May 3, 2014
Will Graham deduces why a murdered musician was transformed into a cello in the Hannibal episode "Fromage."
Aside from the occasional use of Bach and Mozart compositions as source cues (Hannibal Lecter may be a cannibal, but his tastes in dinner music lean towards the classy and erudite), Reitzell refrained from conventional melodies for so long that when the time came for Fuller and Reitzell to close the book on Hannibal, Reitzell wanted to say thank you to the show's small but passionate audience--known as the Fannibals--for expressing their love for the show by finally treating them to a conventional melody at the end of "The Wrath of the Lamb," the series finale. The final six episodes of Hannibal were loaded with fan service, whether they were fast-forwarding the series timeline to retell Red Dragon, the 1981 Thomas Harris novel that started it all and introduced Dr. Lecter, heightening the homoerotic tension between Will and Mads Mikkelsen's Hannibal (but, as Hannibal regular Scott Thompson points out, never really getting them to consummate it) or gifting the Fannibals with an original song that intriguingly carries several different meanings, from the most obvious one, the bizarre love between Will and his frenemy, to the possibility that the song is also about the post-NBC future of the show itself.
I'm no Goth, and I've never cared for Goths, but I've always liked the music of Siouxsie and the Banshees, whose songs have been discovered by a whole new audience after The Weeknd sampled the band's "Happy House" for "House of Balloons/Glass Table Girls" back in 2011. "Love Crime," Siouxsie Sioux's first recording in eight years, is a perfect way for Reitzell--a Banshees fan who co-wrote the tune with Sioux, a fan of Fuller's show--to musically conclude Hannibal, as well as one of Sioux's best songs, a hypnotic ballad in the mold of "Face to Face," the Siouxsie and the Banshees tune that was such a musical highlight of Batman Returns.
The Sioux/Reitzell tune, which I've added to AFOS rotation this week, is also a far better Bond song than "Writing's on the Wall," Sam Smith's official Bond theme for Spectre. Even though "Love Crime" is a ballad and the "I will survive" refrain is an especially resonant and bittersweet lyric for viewers and TV critics who are heartbroken over NBC's cancellation of Hannibal and are hoping Fuller will get his wish to someday revisit the Harris characters in some form or other, "Love Crime" is thankfully devoid of the sappiness of "Whining's on the Wall."
Like "Face to Face" before it, "Love Crime" feels like the Bond song Sioux always wanted to perform but will never get to because she's too weird for the Top 40 radio-obsessed Broccolis. Sioux isn't quite Sade. Now Sade's the performer I've always wanted for a Bond theme, more so than anyone else, even Sioux--"Smooth Operator" would have been perfect for opening a Roger Moore-era Bond flick--yet the Broccolis have stupidly ignored Sade all these years. But with "Love Crime," Sioux proves she was always worthy to join the likes of Shirley Bassey and Shirley Manson. She and Reitzell also prove what a folly several of the Broccolis' choices for Bond main title themes have been ever since Lulu's voice cracked at the end of 1974's "The Man with the Golden Gun," and that high note Lulu clearly had trouble powering through helped cause "The Man with the Golden Gun," a tune even the late John Barry admitted to being ashamed of producing, to become the first of several main title themes in the Bond catalog that are painful to listen to.
That's not all that "Love Crime" surpasses. Will's confrontation with serial killer Francis Dolarhyde (oddly spelled as Dollarhyde by Michael Mann and played by Tom Noonan) to the tune of Iron Butterfly's "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" during 1986's Manhunter--the first time Red Dragon was brought to the screen--remains a classic musical moment in a Mann movie, especially when Iron Butterfly drummer Ron Bushy's drum roll accompanies the William Peterson version of Will badassedly smashing through the window to stop Dollarhyde. Sioux and Reitzell actually recorded "Love Crime" way before "Wrath of the Lamb" episode writers Fuller, Steve Lightfoot and Nick Antosca came up with the scenes "Love Crime" ended up being paired with in the final cut: Will and Hannibal fighting Dolarhyde (now back to one L and played by Richard Armitage) together; a badly wounded Will experiencing a baptism in blood and taking a gutshot Hannibal along with him in his plunge off the cliff; and a drugged Bedelia Du Maurier (Gillian Anderson) being served her own severed and roasted leg by an unknown dinner guest (could that guest be her former patient and partner-in-crime Hannibal?). But after hearing what Sioux and Reitzell accomplished with "Love Crime"--and seeing how beautifully the tune fits with those striking images of Dolarhyde, Will, Hannibal and Bedelia--I prefer "Love Crime" over the drunkenly sung "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" as cathartic music for the defeat of Dolarhyde.
The lyrics during "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" were always dumb anyway. They're the "I'mma take her ass down when she bring her friend around/Fuck 'em both like ayo" of 20-minute makeout songs for white people. The lyrics are so distractingly inane they make you wish Mann's music editor carved up "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" into an instrumental like how Hannibal carves up his victims for dinner.
Plus "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" doesn't have the aforementioned layers of meaning "Love Crime" carries. In addition to the subject matter of the bond between Will and Hannibal (notice the double meaning of "I will," which could also be interpreted as "I, Will"), "Love Crime" is also about Hannibal and Bedelia. Fuller pointed out to TV critic Alan Sepinwall that "what's so fun is that... we hear [Sioux] say, 'I will survive, I will survive,' as we're pushing in on Bedelia, and that could mean she's singing from Hannibal's perspective and it means he has survived and will eat this woman now, or Bedelia's point of view that it's like, 'You may have cut off this leg, but I've got this fork and I'm gonna do some damage before it's done.'"
"Love Crime" could also be interpreted as an anthem for the show itself and its existence in the "deadly game" known as network TV. I'm amazed that a show with so much gore, cannibalism, dark humor and bizarre dream sequences and such a thoughtful approach to mortality and morality managed to last this long on a network like NBC.
Three seasons are a ripe old age for a Fuller show about the subject of death. It's the longest a Fuller creation has lasted on TV (Wonderfalls, the first time many of us developed a crush on Hannibal regular Caroline Dhavernas, lasted only one season, while Pushing Daisies managed to stay alive for two, just like Dead Like Me, which Fuller also created, but he quit Dead Like Me early on due to creative differences). Fuller, who devised the ending of "The Wrath of the Lamb" so that it could be both a satisfying conclusion and the start of a possible new chapter, may think that "the most interesting chapter of Will Graham's story has yet to be told"--Sioux's "I will survive" refrain is basically what must be playing inside Fuller's head whenever he tantalizes the Fannibals with the possibility of a miniseries or movie where Dancy and Mikkelsen would reprise their roles--but personally, I think Will's story ended at the right point.
Plus the continuation of Hannibal would have gotten in the way of what I think Fuller--who's now showrunning the Starz adaptation of Neil Gaiman's American Gods and is attempting to revive Steven Spielberg's Amazing Stories--is destined for: returning to the franchise that gave him his start, Star Trek, and bringing it back to TV (c'mon, CBS All Access, let Fuller have the conn). Three seasons are the perfect lifespan for shows about serial killers who are superhumanly able to get away with so much heinous shit for so long, as opposed to the 38 seasons of Dexter and the 67 seasons of Criminal Minds. Sometimes the feasts with smaller portions are the better ones.
"Love Crime" is now in rotation during the AFOS blocks "AFOS Prime" and "New Cue Revue." Lakeshore Records will release the Hannibal Season 3 Volume 1 and Volume 2 score albums digitally this Friday and on CD in early 2016, just in time for yesterday's DVD and Blu-ray debut of Hannibal's third and final season.
With Le Mans, Steve McQueen, an auto racing enthusiast, set out to make as authentic an auto racing film as possible. The result, which was credited to a director from network TV, frequent '60s Mission: Impossible episode director Lee H. Katzin, was an unconventional, existentialist and documentary-style sports flick that baffled film critics in 1971--they wanted way more melodrama than the scant amount the film preferred to give them--and was ahead of its time. The story of an introverted man who doesn't know how to do anything else, except drive fast, was essentially a Michael Mann movie long before such a thing existed. And what are most Mann movies about? Introverted men who don't know how to do anything else, except break into vaults or track down criminals.
Le Mans isn't the best auto racing film ever made--that spot belongs to the offbeat Talladega Nights ("I like to think of Jesus as a figure skater who wears like a white outfit and he does interpretive ice dances of my life's journey"). But as an auto racing film, Le Mans is more powerful and rewatchable than either the soapy and overstuffed Grand Prix--if John Frankenheimer pared that film down to just the excellently shot racing sequences, it would have been an action masterpiece--or Quentin Tarantino's favorite racing film, the similarly soapy Days of Thunder, Don Simpson's 107-minute love letter to his own coke-fueled self. The power and rewatchability of Le Mans are mostly because of what Le Mans doesn't show and what it doesn't have the characters say.
The subplot about Michael Delaney, McQueen's racer character, and his tentative friendship with the widow (Elga Andersen) of a racing rival who died during one of Delaney's racing accidents barely qualifies as a love story, but the minimal dialogue between McQueen and Andersen and the details their scenes leave out (did Delaney and the widow sleep together in his trailer?) automatically cause their subplot to be far more intriguing as off-the-race-track material than any of the off-the-track Grand Prix scenes that don't feature ahotFrançoiseHardy or an equally hot Jessica Walter. I love how all the exposition in Le Mans is delivered by a barely audible PA announcer and the film--several decades before the invention of the closed captioning option on Blu-rays and DVDs would have made it easier--deliberately makes the audience work hard to understand what the announcer's saying.
I don't even like auto racing, yet Le Mans somehow comes up with many effective ways to make me give a shit about it, whether it's keeping the dialogue to a minimum, staging the racing sequences so that they're not the "disorienting, incoherent blur of mindless action" Nathan Rabin complained about in his Dissolvereassessment of Days of Thunder or capturing remarkable footage of either the actual 24-hour Le Mans race or the onlookers that would be impossible to capture today, perhaps for insurance reasons or simply because it's not 1970. It's hard to dislike a sports flick that comes up with a shot of a spectator like my favorite shot: a young lady is too passed out from drinking to bother to pay attention to Delaney's pit crew springing into action and assisting Delaney out of his Porsche at the end of his latest shift behind the wheel.
Behind the scenes, Le Mans was such a difficult film to make: it started filming without a script; the enigmatic McQueen was at his worst behavior and was at odds with everyone from studio execs to Le Mans' original director, John Sturges, who directed McQueen in The Magnificent Seven and The Great Escape; McQueen and his then-wife were cheating on each other; and a stunt driver had to have his leg amputated after an actual car crash on the set. The Le Mans shoot's endless troubles have been the subject of both a 1999 book (Michael Keyser's A French Kiss with Death) and now a documentary, Steve McQueen: The Man & Le Mans, which hit select theaters last Friday.
The Daily Beastcalls directors Gabriel Clarke and John McKenna's new McQueen doc "a warts-and-all portrait of a man at an unstable time in his life" and is appreciative of how the doc "doesn't look away from the people who were hurt by McQueen's actions." But the Beast isn't as enamored with the doc's overexplanatory nature, in comparison to Le Mans' not-so-explanatory nature ("We don't need to hear someone tell us that McQueen cared about where the camera was, or what shots he was going to be in, because to look at scenes from Le Mans is to immediately understand the artist's curiosity to capture action in images").
The best thing to come out of Steve McQueen: The Man & Le Mans has taken place outside the movie. That would be the bonus tracks on the Varèse Sarabande release of Jim Copperthwaite's ultra-solemn score to Clarke and McKenna's doc. The bonuses are highlights from Michel Legrand's occasionally treacly but otherwise vibrant and effective jazz score to Le Mans.
In 2007, Legrand's Le Mans score--it's basically Legrand in froufrou Thomas Crown Affair mode--was reissued with additional tracks by Universal France, but Varèse's treatment of the Le Mans cues isn't too shabby either. Fortunately, in this incarnation, the Le Mans cues are without the Le Mans race track sound FX that were edited into the music on the 1971 Columbia Records LP release of the Le Mans soundtrack (and then were mostly omitted by Universal France, to the delight of film score music fans who don't like hearing sound clips from movies during those movies' score albums).
"The Race, Final Laps" was cut out of the 1971 film, but it's the best and most energetic of the cues Legrand wrote for Le Mans and Varèse added to the Man & Le Mans album, and it's currently in rotation on "AFOS Prime." It best captures Delaney's intense drive to get his team to the top, even when he himself isn't in first place, as well as the very subject of The Man & Le Mans: McQueen's ambition and desperation to make Le Mans the way he wanted, even at the cost of several friendships, a marriage, a guy's leg and perhaps his own sanity.
Every Throwback Thursday, I randomly pull out from my desk cabinet--with my eyes closed--a movie ticket I saved. Then I discuss the movie on the ticket and maybe a little bit of its score, which might be now streaming on AFOS.
You know you're watching a Michael Mann movie when the drug trade isn't referred to as the drug trade but as "the exotic substances business." In the 2004 thriller Collateral, Mann is, as usual, simultaneously in love with words and so critical of other directors' overuse of them that he shows how satisfying and gripping cinema can be when it's not so over-reliant on words. Unnecessary exposition is a disease that's so awful to experience while watching films or TV that it needs its own telethon. Like how the Jerry Lewis Telethon used to show every year that same moldy clip of Buddy Hackett weeping over the suffering Jerry's Kids experience due to muscular dystrophy, I'd like to see Bobby Moynihan or Broad City star John Gemberling plead weepingly to viewers to give a few dollars to help out the Nolan brothers and cure Jonathan of his tendency outside of Person of Interest to make characters over-explain themselves.
Collateral is fascinating for the way Mann came up with extremely detailed backstories--whether it's for sociopathic contract killer Vincent (Tom Cruise), Max Durocher (Jamie Foxx), the mild-mannered L.A. cabbie who becomes Vincent's chauffeur, hostage and reluctant accomplice, or the powerful "off-shore narco-trafficking cartel" that employs Vincent and is run by capos like Felix Reyes-Torrena (Javier Bardem)--and then threw almost all of that information out of the movie, perhaps as a challenge to himself to keep his movie from drowning in unnatural-sounding, on-the-nose dialogue. Whenever he'd discuss that approach of making the storytelling as efficient as possible in Collateral, Mann would describe it as chopping off the first and second acts of a movie so that it's only the third act. But those elaborate backstories are all there in the eyes and body language of Cruise and Foxx, and sometimes you can miss those nuances Cruise and Foxx bring to their performances, like when Vincent appears to be nauseated about killing a federal prosecution witness (Barry Shabaka Henley) whose love of the music of jazz legends like Miles Davis (he's seen performing Davis' "Spanish Key") was similar to Vincent's or when Vincent briefly panics in the middle of a scuffle during a Koreatown nightclub shootout. Mann pointed out in his Collateral audio commentary that during the scuffle, Vincent is briefly reverting to his 11-year-old self and re-experiencing the fear he felt when he was being bullied, a childhood fear Vincent never once mentions in the film, and Collateral is all the more better for not having Cruise unconvincingly deliver pages and pages of dialogue about a childhood trauma that keeps him sharp (*SNAP!*), on the edge (*SNAP!*), where he's gotta be.
The three months of weapons and combat training Cruise agreed to undertake for his Collateral role is a great example of why Cruise is batshit, but that craziness is also what makes him fascinating to watch as a man of action in this film, Mission: Impossible--Ghost Protocol and now Mission: Impossible--Rogue Nation. He can be obnoxious as either a romantic lead (if there were a drinking game for whenever he touches the face of his leading lady, we'd all be dead from alcohol poisoning), a talk show guest with a psychotic-sounding, unsettling laugh or a Scientology mouthpiece, but in an actioner like Collateral, he's a remarkable actor and not at all obnoxious. Cruise's physicality and his ease in a business suit with performing marksman stances that may look unconventional on film but are commonplace to expert marksmen--especially during the K-town club sequence--would have made him perfect as the similarly dressed Christopher Chance in a more faithful live-action version of the Peter Milligan/Cliff Chiang/Javier Pulido incarnation of Human Target (which the short-lived and much more family-friendly Fox show of the same name was loosely based on).
Cruise's weapons training really paid off, and he's convincing as a military-trained assassin in Collateral, but then Bardem shows up for his cameo and radiates so much power and quiet menace without ever getting out of his seat that part of me wishes Bardem played Vincent instead of Cruise. Bardem is a huge part of why the scene where Max attempts to trick Felix into thinking he's Vincent in order to recover Vincent's lost intel is my favorite scene in Collateral. Cruise isn't even in this Mexican nightclub scene at all. Once Vincent sets foot in Max's cab, Collateral is non-stop tension, but the tension is at its thickest in the scene between Felix and Max because Max is out of his cab and therefore, out of his element, and impersonating Vincent to prevent him from killing his mother Ida (Irma P. Hall)--a woman Max can barely even tolerate--is somehow an even bigger test for Max than all the other tests Vincent previously put him through. Now Max has to do some acting with a gun to his head, which basically describes every single audition in Hollywood.
Bardem and Foxx play the tension so beautifully (the scene also allows Foxx to tap into some of his skills as a comedic performer, but because this is a Mann thriller and not In Living Color or Horrible Bosses, Foxx doesn't play the humorous side of the scene too broadly). You don't know if or when Felix is going to explode, and you don't know if Max is going to get out of Felix's club alive either. Bardem's smooth dance back and forth between benevolence ("Do you know who they like even better than Santa Claus? His helper. Pedro el Negro. Black Peter...") and pent-up anger ("How do you think jolly old Santa Claus would feel if one day Pedro came into his office and said, 'I lost the list'? How fucking furious do you think he will get?") is a bit more interesting than Cruise's all-intense-all-the-time approach. Oh well, at least Bardem got a chance to basically play Vincent three years later in No Country for Old Men. I think he even won an Oscar for it.
(Photo source: DVD Beaver)
Collateral is the closest the ultra-somber Mann has ever gotten--and will probably ever get--in his film directing career to making a comedy. There are several funny moments in Collateral, whether it's Vincent coaching Meek Max on how to tell his pushy dispatcher to fuck off; the Richard T. Jones cop character's unconvinced reaction to Max's lie about hitting a deer on Slauson Avenue ("A South Central deer?"); the hunter (Mark Ruffalo's Detective Fanning) and the prey (Vincent) not knowing they're in the same elevator; or Max-as-Vincent being unable to resist still being Max the business-minded cabbie when he offers Felix's "Hermès/Façonnable ass" a discount (it's also a clever way for Max to stick it to Vincent and deprive him of some cash). But Mann wisely chooses to play those moments as deadpan and as truthfully and honestly as possible. Even some of Al Pacino's shoutiest or chattiest scenes during Heat aren't quite as humorous as those moments during Collateral. In fact, Mann studied Billy Wilder comedies to nail the right tone and delivery for Vincent's sarcasm.
Jason Statham's cameo in Collateral's first scene as a delivery man who's most likely his Frank Martin character from The Transporter is the first sign that Mann and his actors aren't out to brood about corporate malfeasance, racism or society's encroachment on individualism for two hours and are out to simply entertain and bring summertime moviegoers to the edges of their seats (DreamWorks released Collateral in August). Collateral is to Mann's big-screen filmography what Inside Man is to Spike Lee's: it's his most escapist and most popcorn piece of work. I love how the most comedic scene in Collateral is Max's reluctant introduction of a bizarrely polite and formal Vincent to Ida in her hospital room and how Foxx is the least comedic performer in that scene. Both the hospital room scene and the Bardem/Foxx exchange catapult Collateral into being my favorite of Foxx's serious movies. In another bit of unmentioned backstory Mann revealed in his commentrak, Ida is a Livia Soprano-style cold fish who's alienated all her sons so much that all of them except Max have moved out of L.A. just to get away from her. Ida, who knows nothing about Vincent's killings, appears to like Vincent more than any of her sons. She and the similarly cold-blooded Vincent, whose mother died when he was young (that's why he bristles at Max's reluctance to visit Ida, whom Max unhappily visits every night), were made for each other as mom and son. It's Mann channeling Hitchcock at his most darkly comic.
One of the film's other twisted jokes is that Max's own prudishness, partly instilled by Ida, has stifled and crippled Max so badly (he keeps telling customers about his dream of starting his own limo business but can't admit that he's too scared to act on it) that a sociopath--and not a Manic Pixie Dream Girl, an unorthodox classroom teacher or some little orphan--ends up being the one to snap Max out of it and teach him to grab life by the balls by taking more risks and improvising. Some black Collateral fans interestingly view Mann's movie as an allegory of black liberation and the struggles against white privilege (how fitting that this allegory takes place in racially mixed L.A., a city the privileged and wealthy Vincent despises for being too sprawling and disconnected), with the working-class Max's conflict with Vincent functioning as the modern-day equivalent of a slave learning to outwit the overseer and Vincent's demise signaling the end of white privilege. But I don't think Mann and screenwriter Stuart Beattie are that savvy enough to have considered that kind of interpretation for Collateral (Beattie based his script on a cab ride he took, and the ride made him wonder, "What would happen if this cabbie picked up a homicidal maniac and ended up trusting this maniac?"). I see Collateral as more like Mann and Beattie's way of playing around with a couple of formulas: the aforementioned "stuffy character who's taught by another character to loosen up" movie (I bet Collateral was pitched at an early '00s DreamWorks pitch meeting as "The Last Detail if Jack Nicholson killed people") and the tiresome "Magical Negro" drama (like DreamWorks' earlier release The Legend of Bagger Vance, which starred Mann's Ali lead Will Smith). While considering Foxx for the role that Adam Sandler once expressed interest in playing, I could see Mann thinking, in his usual wordy way of speaking, "Maybe it would be more stimulating to the amygdala if we reverse the 'Magic Negro' narrative and make the African American male the one who's beaten down by life and is too ossified to better appreciate it, and a Caucasian hitman ends up being his preceptor."
Collateral really soars during its character study half, due to the chemistry between the African American male formerly known as Wanda and his preceptor. It's a good thing the digital video cinematography by Paul Cameron, who left the project a few weeks into filming due to creative differences with Mann, and his replacement Dion Beebe is intriguing and striking from start to finish. There are so many nifty visual things going on with the high-def cameras' ability to capture little subtleties in the colors of the L.A. night sky and the shimmering city lights (like Darren Franich said in his lengthy 2014 EWessay about Collateral, "You're constantly aware that those lights represent real people--and that those real people don't notice the horrors being perpetrated by Vincent") that those things are able to distract you from how conventional the third act is compared to the rest of Collateral--a movie Mann thought of as a two-hour third act!--when you think about it afterward.
(Photo source: EW)
The movie ditches the character study stuff and goes into full-on "don't open that door, girl!" thriller mode to place Annie (Jada Pinkett Smith), Max's previous customer and the federal prosecutor who wants to shut down Felix's cartel, in danger and in Vincent's crosshairs. The music becomes conventional too: all those bluesy instrumentals Mann originally had in mind for Thief (before he opted for Tangerine Dream) and all those pulsating source cues by the likes of Groove Armada and Paul Oakenfold give way to James Newton Howard in symphonic and percussion-heavy thriller mode a la The Fugitive. Vincent completely shuts off the internal conflict over killing people he's been starting to experience--a little too abruptly for some film critics' tastes--and becomes the Terminator. Sure, film critics, Collateral is a more arresting thriller when Vincent's in conflicted mode, but on second thought, what else is he going to do? Not finish the job? Like Vincent Hanna and Neil McCauley when they briefly bond during Heat over their existential worries about a life without their jobs, killing is all Vincent knows how to do, and if he's going to die doing the thing he does best, that's fine by him. He's a typical professional in a Mann movie.
Two big legacies emerged from Collateral. Cruise proved he can really pull off playing a villain whose only purpose for living is killing, but only when a director like Mann challenges Cruise to step out of his comfort zone and gets him to do some acting instead of "ACTING!"--which is what his previous turn as a villain was like in Interview with the Vampire. The other big legacy is the movie's innovations in digital video cinematography in order to capture nighttime footage--or things like the SoCal palm trees behind Vincent and Max--that couldn't have been achieved with regular film cameras.
"Here, while the [Collateral] digital photography seems fresh and oftentimes comes across as electrically alive, it still looks pretty crummy," wrote either Rodrigo Perez or Jessica Kiang or that Playlistguy who got arrested for pimping an underage girl (like Matt Zoller Seitz implied, The Playlist's decision to not conclude each capsule review in its Mann movie retrospective with a byline causes its otherwise solid retrospective to be kind of a muddled drag). Eh, it was 2004. Get off the movie's 2004 ass. That's such a reductive way of talking about Collateral's impact on cinematography. Before Collateral, Mann experimented with digital video in Ali and on Robbery Homicide Division, the short-lived CBS procedural he produced, but Collateral is where he, with the help of Cameron and Beebe, finally figured out how to keep digital video from looking as crummy as it often did on Robbery Homicide Division (the only post-Collateral Mann movie I've seen is Public Enemies, and I don't think Dante Spinotti's HD cinematography in that 2009 movie looks as impressive as Collateral's still does). A bunch of mainstream films (some shitty, mostly good) followed in Collateral's footsteps and chose to shoot completely in digital, and like Beebe said to American Cinematographer 10 years after Collateral's release, thanks to his movie, filmmakers at night can go out into a street and shoot under streetlights instead of having to light entire city blocks (according to Mann, that standard way of lighting movie sets at night would have ruined the realistic lighting he wanted for Collateral's street scenes).
Michael Mann
Also, whatever crumminess there is in some of Collateral's HD cinematography actually adds an element of "Hmm, which of the 15% of Collateral that Mann shot on film am I watching now?" to the movie in repeat viewings (while Franich is fascinated in repeat viewings by how "Mann shoots Collateral on video and doesn't try to hide it"). If you watch enough early '00s indie movies that were shot in HD, you start to be able to distinguish digital grain from film grain, as well as notice how early '00s digital video has weird smear effects whenever someone's in motion, so a second or third viewing of Collateral turns into a diverting game of "Which scene was not shot in HD?" (Answers: Debi Mazar's scene; the late afternoon scene of Max speaking in Spanish to the gas station clerk; the shots of Max cleaning his cab and he and the other cabbies preparing to drive out of their garage; the jazz club scene; Bardem's scene; and all the shots of Vincent and Max inside the K-town club except for when Vincent kills his assigned Korean target.)
The visuals Mann and Beebe were able to achieve with HD cinematography also really emphasize how much Mann is a cinematic Edward Hopper, fixated on lives in perpetual limbo, much like Hopper was in his paintings. Franich concludes his essay with an astute interpretation of Collateral as a story about L.A. as a purgatory for Max, who's been driving in circles for the past 12 years. But Franich likes to pretend that after Vincent's death inside a sort of limbo--a subway train that looks like it won't ever stop running--and the last shot of a newly confident Max and an exhausted Annie heading out together into both the morning and an uncertain but hopeful future, Max is doomed to relive the same hellish evening with Vincent for the rest of his life a la Groundhog Day. Nah, that shit's too depressing. Max just learned to break out of the limbo he imposed upon himself, and the reward he gets is a time loop? Sure, it's in keeping with how Mann stories frequently end tragically, ever since Thief and all those Miami Vice episodes with downbeat conclusions and that gut-punch of an "Executive Producer Michael Mann" credit defiantly saying each week, "You expecting a freeze-framed high-five between Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas, motherfucker?" But let Max win this one. The motherfucker motherhater earned it.
Every Throwback Thursday, I randomly pull out from my desk cabinet--with my eyes closed--a movie ticket I saved. Then I discuss the movie on the ticket and maybe a little bit of its score, which might be now streaming on AFOS.
Getaway drivers are like the bassplayers of heist-movie crews: nobody gives two shits about them. Adapted from the 2005 James Sallis novel of the same name by screenwriter Hossein Amini, director Nicolas Winding Refn's Drive is a heist flick that takes a different turn and gives getaway drivers their due by telling everything from the point of view of the wheelman. The film's two heist sequences literally leave out all the lock-picking bits and all the breaking-into-the-vault bits, and as a bit of a sly joke that's reminiscent of Andy Kaufman standing around on stage and waiting for his cue to lip-sync the "Here I come to save the day!" part of the Mighty Mouse theme, the heist sequences just show Ryan Gosling waiting in the car and considering his next move in case the heist goes wrong. Refn is so skilled at building tension in Drive that these sequences are still gripping even without ever setting foot inside the electronics warehouse that's broken into or the pawn shop that gets held up.
Drive is also Gosling and Refn's twisted version of a superhero movie (regarding the subject of superhero movies, Gosling joked, "All the good ones were taken, so I made up my own"). It's done not like a quippy Marvel Cinematic Universe blockbuster or a shouty Zack Snyder speed-ramp fest but in the nearly silent, actions-speak-louder-than-words style of older action flicks Refn and the Drive producers (and I) love, whether it's Michael Mann's Thief, Peter Yates' Bullitt, John Boorman's Point Blank or Walter Hill's The Driver (Hill's movie is the only one I haven't seen out of those four older actioners).
The superhero Gosling plays is a garage mechanic and Hollywood stunt driver who's never referred to by name in the movie, not even by Shannon (Bryan Cranston, who guest-starred in a standout 1998 X-Files episode that's also called "Drive"), his boss at the garage and father figure. The Gosling character is listed in the end credits as simply "Driver," a shout-out to the way Hill's movie identifies Ryan O'Neal's character as just "The Driver." The mechanic's superpower is his badass stunt driving skills, which he puts to use at night in his side gig as a getaway wheelman. In case we miss Refn's interpretation of Driver (no relation to Adam or Minnie?) as a superhero, the scorpion emblem on the back of Driver's white satin jacket is designed to look like Spider-Man's, and the theme music for the love story between Driver and his neighbor Irene (Carey Mulligan) is "A Real Hero" by the Toronto duo Electric Youth and French producer/remixer College.
There's one other superpower I almost forgot: Driver's prowess with a hammer or knife (or a gun, even though like O'Neal, he prefers not to carry one) whenever either his life is threatened--both Driver and Shannon frequently get into business with dangerous people--or the lives of Shannon, Irene and her six-year-old son Benicio (Kaden Leos) are threatened. You don't want to be on the other end of a fight with Driver whenever he's wielding a hammer or knife. And that's where the twisted part of this Refn take on a superhero movie comes in: Driver also happens to be a sociopath who's capable of terrifying, childlike and almost-got-slapped-with-an-NC-17-rating violence when you least expect it. Refn and cinematographer Newton Thomas Sigel, who regularly handles the cinematography for Bryan Singer's directorial efforts (like the bizarrely orange-hued pilot episode Singer directed for House), both shoot Driver's nighttime retribution against an L.A. crime boss named Nino (Ron Perlman) like a horror movie sequence, right down to the creepy, Michael Myers-style stuntman mask Driver chooses to don for his pursuit of Nino.
Amini and Refn also upend one other aspect of superhero movies: the romance (SPOILER). Many of them end with the superhero (unless he's a bizarre monkish type like the Tobey Maguire version of Peter Parker, who doesn't have time for sex even though Kirsten Dunst, Mageina Tovah, Elizabeth Banks and Bryce Dallas Howard all throw themselves at him) getting the girl, while Drive ends with Driver forcing himself to leave behind Irene and Benicio because it's the only way he can protect them from any remaining associates or underlings of Jewish gangster Bernie Rose (a cast-against-type and convincingly intimidating Albert Brooks). Driver's chaste romance with Irene--who's still on good terms with her husband and Benicio's father, Standard Gabriel (Oscar Isaac), an ex-con who happens to be returning home from prison right when Driver's starting to bond with Irene--is more interestingly played and more maturely handled than most romances in actual superhero movies. That's because it's depicted with minimal dialogue and expressed mainly through glances between Gosling and Mulligan.
"He sees her in a grocery store. Cut to the parking lot... Cut to them in the elevator. He's helping her carry her bags upstairs. Cut to them in her apartment. She's giving him some water, and an entire movie is happening between them, and we don't need to hear the fuckin' dialogue! It's all in their looks, it's all in the shots. It's just absolutely beautiful," said A History of Violence screenwriter Josh Olson during his Trailers from Hell discussion of Drive and its refreshing lack of unnecessary exposition.
The idea to discard most of the dialogue that was written for their scenes together came from both Gosling and Mulligan. It was a bold and terrific choice. Moviegoers who either giggled over Driver's laconicism (I'd hate to see them watch Steve McQueen in Bullitt because they'll probably end up fracturing a rib) as if they were watching that old and bizarre clip of Gosling singing some Jodeci on The Mickey Mouse Club or complained that "Gosling doesn't talk enough in this movie!" clearly want everything spoon-fed to them (Drive received a C- from moviegoers at CinemaScore in 2011). I know I keep quoting my favorite line from Road House, but it's very apt here: they're too stupid to have a good time.
Driver is so terse and so uninterested in talking about his past that the only line of dialogue about his past comes from Shannon when he recalls to Irene the day Driver came to his garage looking for work (whereas by the end of that great diner scene between James Caan and Tuesday Weld in Thief--which is full of exposition, but it's delivered naturally and realistically and in the manner of a typical diner conversation--we know every little bit of the Caan character's incarcerated past and what makes him tick). Both Driver's terseness and the lack of information about his past before the garage have caused Drive and its enigmatic main character to be open to interpretation, which is part of what makes this movie continue to be fascinating. Moviegoers like Olson believe Driver is somewhere on the autism spectrum, while an actual psychologist who preferred to remain anonymous and was asked by a movie blog in 2011 to profile Driver's behavior concluded that he's more like someone with obsessive compulsive personality disorder (which isn't the same as OCD) than an autistic savant. That psych profile also theorized that Driver was raised on a farm (!).
My interpretation of Driver is that he did time when he was younger, and Shannon took him in right after he got out of prison (I don't view him as someone who grew up on a farm). It's a backstory Gosling tells primarily through his eyes and body language, just like what Charlize Theron does with her character Furiosa in Mad Max: Fury Road. For instance, look at how Driver silently reacts to the presence of Standard, whose past decision-making hasn't exactly been the best and whose sizing-up of Driver when he first encounters him in their apartment building's hallway is fraught with unspoken hostility towards "Mom's new friend." Driver gives a look in that hallway scene (and in a later scene where Standard tells him he's into the mob for some money) that says, "Bad decision-makers like Standard were all over the yard."
I contemplated Olson's reading of Drive as a story about an autistic wheelman and thought it made some sense for a few weeks. But then after rewatching Drive in its entirety, I realized his reading doesn't quite fit, despite Driver's savant-style memorization of the streets and freeways of L.A. for his gig as a wheelman. I don't think Driver's on the spectrum. He's simply a criminal who, like Neil McCauley from Heat, taught himself not to waste his words and to keep himself as quiet and invisible as possible to avoid attracting the attention of either the prison guards, the cops or his enemies.
Even though Driver often looks like he'd rather be behind the wheel of a muscle car or under some vehicle's hood than face-to-face with any of the hotheaded crooks who enlist his services, he's able to maintain eye contact with people whose company he likes, and he can read social cues. He's capable of understanding or expressing humor, especially when he's around Benicio (who's like a less chatty version of the kid in Shane), but he approaches humor stoically, of course. His interactions with Benicio and the only two scenes in the movie where he shows fear in his voice--that would be the scene where he expresses to Irene his remorse for failing to protect Standard even though he tried his best to help him and the scene where he gets mad at Shannon for accidentally putting Irene in danger and pleads with him to leave L.A. to stay alive--all prove he's not on the spectrum. As for Léon, the Manhattan hitman who drinks nothing but milk, wears Urkel pants that are four sizes too short, relates to his houseplant better than he relates to other people and doesn't recommend to a 12-year-old girl who makes a pass at him that she ought to look for boys closer to her age...
Refn never mentioned Léon: The Professional, which I actually watched for the first time last week, as one of his influences during interviews about Drive, but I like to pretend Refn also viewed Drive as a variation on Léon that doesn't contain all that bothersome and creepy material about a 12-year-old girl's sexuality and chooses to split the Natalie Portman character into two different characters: a six-year-old kid and his mom, a more age-appropriate female for the lead to experience romantic tension with. Or maybe Refn just viewed Drive as a metaphor for Christianity's encroachment on the Norse religions, like action film reviewer Outlaw Vern once joked. Whatever the reading, Drive is one of those movies that will be subjected for years to many different interpretations/theories ("He has Asperger's!" "Nah, he's actually an alien from a planet that won't eat cereal!") or film studies essays about its efficient script or stylized visual approach (meanwhile, mainstream Hollywood has started imitating Drive: Jack Reacher has taken the Lee Child novel series and coated it in a Drive-like stylized sheen, while the vicious side of Driver clearly influenced Antoine Fuqua's remake of The Equalizer, which originally had Refn attached to it as director).
I wouldn't be surprised if Drive someday winds up as the subject of an essay for a film studies course about Jews on screen, due to a part of Drive that's not as open to interpretation as other parts of the movie. That would be the uneasy alliance between Bernie, whose line about his Hollywood past as a Golan-Globus-ish producer of '80s B-movies is straight out of The Limey ("One critic called them European. I thought they were shit"), and Nino, whose resentment over demanding respect from his anti-Semitic Italian superiors and never getting it brings about everyone's downfall, including Driver's. Their alliance reflects tensions within the Jewish community over how Jewish modern-day Jews prefer to be, with Nino being the self-hating Jew in this situation (what's the Yiddish name for "Tom"?). I particularly like how instead of on-the-nose, They Came Together-style exposition, food is used in one of their earlier scenes together to illustrate the contrasting ways Bernie and Nino view their Jewish heritage: Bernie's preference for Chinese food gives away that he's Jewish to the core, while Nino's choice of a pizzeria as a front for his business illustrates that he's a Jew who thinks he's Italian. At one point, Bernie says all we need to know about his disdain for Nino when he addresses him by his real name: Izzy.
Drive is also bound to be subjected to many experiments with its music, like last year's BBC Three rescoring of Drive, which was music-supervised by Radio 1's Zane Lowe. He got artists like Banks and Laura Mvula to record new original tracks for Drive, and the results were negatively received, although Refn gave the rescore his approval. I haven't watched the rescored version in its entirety, but after watching just two of the new songs get grafted onto the movie (one of them, "Get Away" by Chvrches, is actually pretty solid, but I would have placed it in a different scene, like one that's unscored and could use a source cue), it proves how irreplaceable both the pulsating and well-chosen existing songs and Cliff Martinez's perfectly realized original score are.
Fans of Gosling or Drive who went over the top on Twitter and tweeted angry reactions to the rescore, I'll let you in on a little secret: you can always go back to the original version of Drive. It's not as if Lowe destroyed all copies of the original version--like what George Lucas was rumored to have done to the negatives of the pre-Special Edition cuts of the first three Star Wars movies--and replaced them with his rescore. But the fans who posted melodramatic tweets in response to BBC Three's rescore acted as if that had happened. The Drive that you know and love isn't going away any time soon. Electric Youth will still be there, serenading a pleasant afternoon drive along the L.A. River with their ode to "a real human being and a real hero." And a real badass with a hammer.
Selections from the Drive score are in rotation during "AFOS Prime" on AFOS.
