Monday at the Movies - September 2, 2013

Welcome to another edition of “Monday at the Movies” – this week, we review two films that are really quite draining in an entirely delectable sense.

Drive (2011) – Here’s a movie that’s way more intense than I was expecting.  In Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive, Ryan Gosling plays a stunt driver, moonlighting as a getaway driver, who becomes embroiled in the underworld after falling in love with his neighbor (Carey Mulligan).  I don’t really know what I thought I was getting into; I’d only heard rave reviews, and I’ve never seen a Gosling performance I didn’t like.  But Drive is such an oddball captivating flick, its glacial pace tempered by Refn’s keen cinematographic eye – the result is something closer to There Will Be Blood than 2001: A Space Odyssey.  All this is not to say that the film is boring; rather, Refn directs the daylights out of some car chases without resorting to shaky cameras or even quick cuts, relying on the natural tension of the narrative and a well-placed close-up on Gosling’s steely stare.  Drive is undeniably Gosling’s show (Refn’s direction, though, giving a run for his proverbial money), but an astounding array of supporters – Mulligan, Bryan Cranston, Christina Hendricks, Ron Perlman, and Albert Brooks as a spooky mobster sans eyebrows – fill out the film with that who’s-who delight enjoyed by moviegoers such as myself.  But boy, is this a violent flick, with some of the most jarring violence I’ve seen in movies recently – and, remember, I loved Django Unchained.  But Refn’s use of violence is sparse, used to jar and interrupt and not to delight; essentially, it does what violence actually does in real life, which makes it all the more effective and/or disturbing.  Drive, then, comes highly recommended.

Take Shelter (2011) – Is there any working actor more intense than Michael Shannon?  He’s always wound tighter than Taft’s bathtub, but when that simmer boils over it’s explosively good fun to watch.  Take Shelter might have been a dull picture with any other front man, but Shannon does fantastic work in an Oscar-snubbed lead performance as Curtis, a family man haunted by nightmares of an impending apocalypse.  As his behavior becomes increasingly obsessive and erratic, Curtis risks alienating his wife (Jessica Chastain), who’s especially worried about the fate of their deaf daughter and what will happen to the family if Curtis’s burgeoning psychosis threatens his own employment as a construction worker.  This is not a movie where much happens; instead, the film relies on the capable performances of Shannon and Chastain, who are more than believable as beleaguered Midwestern spouses.  The film is undeniably Shannon’s, his clairvoyance/psychosis (depending on how you read the film) taking a clear toll on his wellbeing as he grimaces and twitches in quiet moments before squinting into the horizon or, in one of the film’s strongest moments, unleashing his manic frustrations on his friends.  While she stands in a long shadow, Chastain is the emotional anchor of the film, the audience’s point of interaction as voice to a thousand doubts and frustrations; I don’t know where she came from all of a sudden, but her work in the past few years (particularly Zero Dark Thirty) demonstrates that Hollywood needs more of her kind of actress.  More indie than blockbuster, Take Shelter flew low enough under the radar that more people ought to see it – especially those of us needing a little more intensity from General Zod.

That does it for this week’s edition of “Monday at the Movies.” We’ll see you here next week!  And don’t forget that this Saturday is the Double-Oh-Seventh of the month...