"Drive" Pays Homage to Eastwood

Last night, my wife and I viewed the Nicholas Refn film, Drive, starring Ryan Gosling. We both loved it, enjoying the Los Angeles locales, the driving scenes, and the painterly visual composition and color affectation of many scenes in the first half. She was surprised at the graphic violence in the second half and withdrew from the movie a bit in reaction. I was completely engaged and enjoyed seeing really bad people meet their deserved deaths (this is movie fiction we talking about here, remember). I would label the first half (the dramatic first half) "reverie" and the second half "reality". Though the movie is ostensibly based on a novel, the real inspiration, we both agreed, is Clint Eastwood's film, Pale Rider (1985). In Drive, Gosling plays the Eastwood character, the Preacher, in precisely the same minimalist style, taciturn, few words, few facial expressions, effectively dealing out death as punishment for evil, unable to stay with the woman who believes in him, riding (driving) toward the horizon at the end. The urban setting is visibly a familiar fallen world, where psychopaths scuttle like cockroaches, devouring social garbage in the grips of sin. The symbolism is as clear as the natural wilderness setting of Pale Rider, out of which rides the Preacher to halt evil and avenge past crimes. I thought Gosling's acting was excellent and contributed enormously to the suspense that builds through the movie. The movie is an effective Hollywood film noir interpretation of a classic Western film and its film genre.