On Nicolas Winding Refn's Drive (2011) and why it is better than its reputation as a cool crime film.

Drive was marketed as a Ryan Gosling action film. The audiences who arrived expecting the action film that the marketing promised were disappointed and sometimes hostile. The film that was actually made is a slow, dreamy, mythologically charged story about a man who is all surface — no past, no context, no inner life on display — and the way that surface is both protective and fatal.

Refn uses the visual language of 1980s American crime films — the neon, the wide shots of empty streets, the score by Cliff Martinez and Kavinsky — not as pastiche but as dream logic. The film takes place in a Los Angeles that feels like a memory of Los Angeles rather than its actuality. The violence, when it comes, is sudden and disproportionate and real in a way that the dreamlike sequences around it are not.

Gosling gives one of the most controlled and least understood performances of his career. The character speaks very little and the camera watches his face in close-up with a patience that forces the viewer to look at what is not being said. The space between his expressions is where the character lives.