Drive, She Said

I don't want to waste too much time with this comment, basically because I don't have many good things to say about this movie. The first twenty minutes or so are mildly entertaining, but then, it simply falls apart. The comedic bits aren't funny, I was indifferent to the dramatic moments, and there was nothing to like about these dull characters (especially the leads). In fact, even though I saw this movie a mere five days ago, I've already forgotten how the film ended. Need I say more?

A beautiful, art-deco-ish opening credit sequence, set to beguiling bossa-nova flavored music, seems to promise something unusually quirky and allusive. For ten or fifteen minutes that still seems possible, before the movie - through a lame kidnapper-hostage love story - descends into astonishing predictability, and takes on a kind of joyless, sombre melancholy. The very short running time seems like a simple surrender, and falls far short of the feminine self-validation that's apparently intended. The saddest thing is that even if the movie had achieved what seem to be its goals, you'd still shrug at it.

I thought this was a very nice meditation on genre, gender, and a very professionally shot "indie" film about a woman who is finding her her own identity - and what she's capable of.

All wrapped up in a bank-robber/on-the-run-from-the-law story, the guy isn't very interesting; it's all about the woman (Moira Kelly). Sure she falls in love with him...or maybe the idea of being in love and on the run. A smart script, nice elliptical thematic touches to keep things moving on a more "conceptual" level.

The other comments that note there is no "plot" miss the point. It's about her "movement" - through space, down the road, and into a state of understanding.

I hope this person makes more movies.

Though the script has indeed been done to death already, it's not the script itself so much as the wonderful filter it's put through that makes this worth seeing. The basic outline of the plot is embarrassing just to summarize--a woman is forced to choose between security with her boring bank teller fiancée, and heady but dangerous freedom with the good-looking bank robber who kidnaps her. Seriously. It's clichéd to its very bones, in every detail, at pretty much every moment.

It's kind of amazing that the writer/director of 'Double Happiness' would invest any time or effort in this idea, but give her credit: she really invested time and effort in it. I've been trying to nail down what it is she's doing here, and it's difficult. She tells this story with utter sincerity, but never seems to be pretending that it's anything but absurd. There's no way we would ever buy this setup, so why not make it all look like some sort of fluid, color-saturated dream? There's barely a plot to hang together, so why not just sort of slide through it in a happy, dreamy reverie? And yet the characters are written and performed exactly like people who've never seen a movie in which anything like this ever happened, and are so surprised by each development that they nearly trick us into being surprised ourselves. Search me as to why this is so watchable.

In short, 'Drive, She Said' could have been a boring, listless road movie with a scanty story, and instead it's a dreamlike, beautiful road movie with a scanty story. More profound insights can be had from a movie, without a doubt, but it's hard to begrudge one that's so clearly happy to be alive.