Peter Canavese
2013-08-08 20:00:53 UTC
Hill has remained a steadily stylish presence in the idiom of action cinema. His genres of concern tend to be the Western and the urban crime drama, and the twain meet in neo-noir <em>The Driver</em>.
Though he has never really risen in appreciation above cult status, Walter Hill has remained a steadily stylish presence in the idiom of action cinema. His genres of concern tend to be the Western and the urban crime drama, and the twain meet in neo-noir The Driver. A primary inspiration for Nicholas Winding Refn's 2011 picture Drive, Hill's well-oiled machine stars Ryan O'Neal as a laconic "cowboy desperado" locked in conflict with Bruce Dern's self-appointed sheriff.
The stripped-down quality of The Driver isn't avoidance: Hill is after blood-simplicity, an actions-speak-louder-than-words exhibition match of two men with personal codes that are at odds but also clearly twinned. O'Neal's The Driver and Dern's The Detective engage in a winner-take-all conflict for supremacy, a pissing contest—played for top-prize masculinity and intimate, implicative bragging rights—that Isabelle Adjani's Player calls a "sucker's game." The Player, a casino dealer, has witnessed O'Neal at his criminal work as a getaway driver, and so she is wanted by both men for non-sexual reasons. But men are men, and women are women, so the men's apparent lack of sexual interest ain't necessarily so (though certainly more possessive than passionate), and The Player's stated motivation of money (pointedly, to escape the control of another, unseen man) may not be the end of her interest, either.
Much goes unstated in The Driver, and it's an amusing irony that Hill trimmed from the film some unnecessary dialogue that says as much. In the film's alternate opening, Dern's character instructs his new partner, "When you're talkin', you're not thinkin'. Never talk—unless you have to." Both men place their pride in being the best at what they do, and they equally disdain the unprofessional and admire the professional in others. We don't see much in the way of bad police work (though The Detective's crew allow themselves to be ineffectual bystanders to Dern's alpha male), but the story does make room for foils to O'Neal's Driver: a terrible getaway driver and, later, a worthy opponent for the climactic car chase.
Though cat-and-mouse theatrics fill out the story, The Driver is not-surprisingly defined by its amazing driving sequences, one per act. Like Drive, The Driver begins with a job that involves evading multiple police cars and sets the plot in motion. The second scene fascinatingly involves one car chasing its tail to send a message: about the Driver's virtuosity and his unwillingness to be toyed with, at least on anyone else's terms. The climax returns to a literal chase dynamic as the Driver—with the Player at shotgun—dead-set on resolving his plan-gone-wrong. Hill gets evocative performances all around (also of note: Ronee Blakely's no-nonsense Connection), but it's the astonishing stunt work where the rubber meets the road.
|
|