Many of the movies I fell for as a kid drew a healthy portion of their magic from freely picking over the bones of the cinema that came decades before them. Most of what George Lucas and Steven Spielberg released in the 80s, for example, reveled in an unabashed nostalgia for the past. Many older filmgoers at the time held this approach to filmmaking in disdain, but for me and most everyone my age, it was a legitimate strategy for imagining what movies could be about. “Star Wars” and “Raiders of the Lost Ark” were more than just rehashes of old movie serials; they were more sophisticated than their progenitors, more complete in their visions, more contemporary and alive to the audiences of that particular period than the source material could ever have been.
I still feel this way, that revisiting the past — even borrowing heavily from it — is a legitimate and even necessary part of the dialog that film conducts with itself and its audience. (For that matter, it’s an essential dialog for all art forms.) Still, it’s one thing to justify this technique when yours is the generation doing the borrowing; it’s a different experience when yours is the generation being borrowed from.
This was my experience watching Nicolas Winding Refn’s “Drive,” a remarkable movie that is irresistible in its craftsmanship but mildly suspect in its originality. It stars Ryan Gosling as an archetype of cool, a Steve McQueen like mystery man of very few words, absurdly lengthy pauses and super-human fighting and driving skills, whose zen-like mastery of his world goes awry when he begins to entangle himself with other humans.
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