In Which We Get This Show On The Road

Drive Angry (3D)

by ELISABETH DONNELLY

Drive
dir. Nicholas Winding Refn
100 minutes

For the first ten minutes, Nicholas Winding Refn's Drive is a fantastic movie: tense and thrilling, with a meticulous, soft spoken getaway driver, The Driver, pushing his way through Los Angeles, gunning through lights, across bridges, pulling off hairpin turns to hide the car from the all-seeing helicopter eye in the sky, only to pull into a parking lot chocked with L.A. Clippers fans, the easiest place to disappear. Most importantly, what gives the sequence suspense is the diegetic cue of the Clippers game on the radio, fighting for airspace with the police CB. Those voices give Driver's driving purpose, and the audience can imagine that played out on Ryan Gosling's placid, smooth face.

But after that scene, Driver keeps driving, and the neo-80s synth squalls and gurgles that pass for an updated Pretty in Pink soundtrack take over the film, and more importantly, swell with importance during any scene where Driver drives. Drive is a movie with air quotes around it, a European reimaginging of American noir with a John Hughes fixation and a hard-on for style over anything approaching empathy or character.

Watching it felt like watching a Paul Verhoeven film dedicated to making fun of America, with nothing pointed at the center, just an exercise in nothingness. Worst of all, Drive doesn't understand the art of driving, the necessary relationship that Americans have with their cars and the mythology of the open road.

Driving is an art — it is an art of being completely zen, in the moment, and it's also one of those wonderful, private/public spaces where the world can see you, but you're safe. You can be yourself. Gosling's Driver is a man with no name, no discernible personality, and when he's asked what he does, he replies, "I drive." The scene goes on, with Gosling and his love interest, Carey Mulligan, just staring at each other like two adorable puppies.

But if a driver is defined by driving, then why doesn't he give away any feeling or emotion when he's behind the wheel? Why isn't he playing silly pop songs on the radio, occasionally singing along to Delilah's radio show while midwesterners and the elderly talk about the people they've lost? Because Drive is a boring film about driving, filming Los Angeles like it's a Miami Vice movie, barely daring to have any cool stunt driving scenes — after all, why have them, when you can have a scene with Ryan Gosling staring off into the distance in a way that may indicate meaning or existentialism? Refn films Los Angeles like he's making fun of it, like it's an ugly, squalid little hellhole of ironic signs and darkness.

The taciturn, nearly catatonic vibe of Gosling's Driver means that there's a big, empty hole at the middle of the film. Drive is assembled for maximum mystery and intrigue — who is this guy? Where does he come from? What does he want? But Gosling offers nothing, instead making the Driver another variation on his Lars and the Real Girl character, which made Drive feel like Lars and the Real Girl 2 most of the time. The blankness — not even a Mona Lisa smile of intrigue in there — is in stark relief to the weathered, character-filled face of Bryan Cranston, who fluttered around as the only real source of geniality and good cheer in this morose little film. (Walter White 4-eva!)

Between Gosling's obviously super-deep quiet man routine and the girlish Carey Mulligan sticking out like a sweet little squirrel in a role clearly meant for a woman with gravity and less of a milky English rose bellwether of good decorum and breeding (not for nothing is Gosling hooking up with Eva Mendes right now, an actress with womanly gravity), the romance, set to synth songs and googly-eyed glances, is nothing worth protecting.

So when the old ultraviolence comes into play, the film accelerates from boring to moderately bonkers — Driver has gotten in a pickle, you see, and Carey Mulligan may quite possibly die, so all sorts of crime and ketchup blood smears go off for the sake of a plot.

Most of the violence is cartoonish. Nothing feels like it matters, because there's no there there, no sense of inevitability, no thrust to what's happening. The villains loom (and Albert Brooks is the latest comedian to be overrated for being serious in a movie, clearly he's ripe for his Bill Murray role in a Wes Anderson-wannabe film), Christina Hendricks brings soulfulness and vulnerability to a role that's entirely too short, and more cool things happen because they look interesting.

Driver goes after Ron Perlman in his stunt driver face mask, creating an uncanny valley effect, Driver's sweet satin jacket with the scorpion on the back gets more and more blood stained and nobody seems to notice or care (the best joke in the film). And then there's that other borderline great scene — Driver kisses Mulligan's character in an elevator, the sort of kiss you write sonnets and poems about, a kiss where something's happening, and then he beats the shit out of the potential hitman in the elevator, crunching on his skull to the point of disgust. And Carey Mulligan just stands there. Perhaps, however, maybe all of this silence, this lack of Refn telling you, the audience what to think, is meaningful. It doesn't read as such — it's empty, goofy style, a total mess.

To its credit, however, it's an interesting mess, and not necessarily a disposable one. But really, if you're trying to make a movie that's entertaining, that has some guts to its structure, you don't have your hero use four of his twelve lines talking about "the scorpion and the frog" when there's a scorpion on his jacket. It's really on-the-nose and groanworthy, just like the closing song that calls the Driver "a real human being, and a real hero." Yes, it's sort of funny, but it's definitely in air quotes, and it has no interest in making the audience feel and marvel at anything. Just a passing giggle.

Elisabeth Donnelly is the senior contributor to This Recording. She tumbls here and twitters here. She last wrote in these pages about My So-Called Life.

"Pretty in Pink" - The National (mp3)

"Bring On The Dancing Horses" - Echo & the Bunnymen (mp3)

"Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want" - The Smiths (mp3)

In Which We're Totally Over Jordan Catalano

Sex or a Conversation

by ELISABETH DONNELLY

When I first saw My So-Called Life, I was a kid. My basketball team practice clashed with the show and I would rush home to catch what I could of the episodes. I wanted to be Angela Chase, to be shy and emotional, to try to grow beyond people's expectations by hanging out with the school's bad girl and dying my hair red. My best friend dyed her hair red. I got a ridiculous crush on Jared Leto as Jordan Catalano, finding him - with his floppy hair, those big blue eyes, and his fraying shirt collar - to be the sexiest thing in the world. I thought about what it would be like to make out in the boiler room, what it would be like to make out with anybody.

By watching and sort of understanding My So-Called Life, I knew what it was going to be like to be a teenager, and it would, hopefully, be awesome. I empathized with Angela Chase. I cried when Claire Danes cried. I knew that Rayanne betrayed her by hooking up with Jordan, that her former best friend Sharon the good girl sort of hated her, and that Jordan was endlessly frustrating. I knew dear, sweet Ricky Vasquez was the sort of friend you wanted to have. The fact that he was gay was mostly theoretical - I didn't really know what it meant. Sometimes I related to Brian Krakow, the severely frustrated brain. Angela's parents were so boring. I got really confused during that Juliana Hatfield-as-Christmas angel episode, but I still bought the official My So-Called Life soundtrack and heard The Afghan Whigs for the first time. "Fountain and Fairfax" reminded me of the desperation and lust that Jordan Catalano had to have somewhere, pulsing inside of him.

It was an intense affair, over too quickly. I was sad when the show died but I got over it by forgetting about it. Angela faded. Like a friend that I had at one point who moved, and we lost touch. But every episode, every scene, was written in my heart. I had an elephant's memory for that show, since it was such a good and absorbing story about a girl.

My So-Called Life should be mentioned in the pantheon of coming-of-age classics next to The Catcher in the Rye and just before Freaks and Geeks. Part of the reason that the show worked is because it was specifically about a girl - as simple as that - just one average 15-year-old girl, feeling so many feelings in a dingy Pittsburgh suburb. The week by week stories on the show dealt with guns in school, a substitute teacher, drugs, alcohol, teen homelessness, and maybe losing your virginity to the hot bad boy, typical 90s hot button subjects, but Winnie Holzman, the creator of the show, was so specific about Angela Chase and her multitude of emotions that the audience was right there with her.

I recently decided to rewatch My So-Called Life with my boyfriend. It felt like I was introducing him to a secret teenage me. I worried about what he would think - because if he hated it, there was a chance that he maybe hated some part of me that existed at some point. But there was no need to worry. Even as a grown-ass woman, My So-Called Life holds up, a work of art that bent and changed with the time and with the ways that I had changed.

What makes it work - even if the clothes are so 90s and dated, plaid on plaid on plaid, even if the tendency for the episode of the week to be about subjects like guns in school or the cool substitute teacher - is the voice. TV shows are rarely so specifically from one character’s idosyncratic perspective. Creator Winnie Holzman wrote Angela as a very particular girl with likes and dislikes, a girl who was a passable student but not extraordinary, occasionally luminous but still awkward, who loved Jordan Catalano even though she was aware that he was a pretty face and a bit of a dolt.

She wasn't imagined as "the smart one" or "the pretty one." Her diary-like constant voice over provided a specific counterpoint to the action, whether quippy or earnest. It’s no coincidence that some of the show’s most quotable lines came from the voice over - "My parents keep asking how school was. It's like saying, "How was that drive-by shooting?" You don't care how it *was*, you're lucky to get out alive," The recurring thing in Angela's voiceover, and the dialogue as a whole, is that it was riddled with verbal insecurities, "likes," and "I don't knows" and "or something," and that was accepted as the way they talk. It's never used to point out that the characters are stupid, which a lesser show would do.

My So-Called Life was one of the few teenage girl shows with the luxury to be utterly mundane, plot-wise. The show starts off with Angela Chase, a nice girl, trying on a little bit of rebellion at fifteen years old. She ditched her old, boring best friend Sharon Cherski for the “wild” Rayanne Graff and her sidekick, Ricky Vasquez, and the trio skips class to hang out in the girls’ bathroom.

Angela has a hopeless rush on bad boy Jordan Catalano, and life gives her a chance with him that ends up with some making out in the school's boiler room and one of those frustratingly sexy non-relationships with no definition, like a precursor to "hooking up." She has an annoying relationship with her neighbor and school brain Brian Krakow. Her parents, Patty and Graham, are similarly trying to make something of themselves - Patty cuts her hair, tries to reboot her relationship, and Graham chafes at the bit, maybe starting a restaurant with that horrible Hallie person.

It was funny to see how ten years on, the fairly nuanced nerd with a hopeless crush, Brian Krakow, grew in overall creepiness. His sadsack high school nice guy loser persona had its charms, sort of, in its earnestness when I first watched it, but as a woman, no way. He had a sense of entitlement and treated women (particularly the lovely - and chubby - Delia from the world happiness dance) like crap, with a one-track mind focused on Angela. It didn't make sense, really - why should Krakow be sad? In ten years, every Judd Apatow movie will be about the trials and travails of a Krakow-like character.

Jordan Catalano, well, it was more obvious that he was a pretty face and had his limitations. He's such a sneering boy when Angela refuses to have sex with him (because in the 90s, virginity is tantamount to goodness - which is why Rayanne was "bad" - and being the star of a show, and losing it was the making of a very special episode). His dream to "make snow," like one of those guys in the mountains, is just further proof that he's not really a long-term prospect.

If there had been another season or two, Catalano probably would've become a Tim Riggins on Friday Night Lights, a loveable fuck-up, but we didn't have that much time with him. Despite all those 90s clothing choices, Jared Leto, at that point, still radiated some palpable sexual heat. It's the reason why you can say the name Jordan Catalano to a generation of women and elicit a palpable sigh, why My So-Called Life on YouTube is basically a collection of Angela and Jordan moments, namely the one where he finally acknowledges that he likes her, publicly, by grabbing her hand in the hallway:

I was really struck by the way that Ricky and Rayanne, played magnificently by Wilson Cruz and A.J. Langer, stole my heart as an adult. I wonder, sometimes, if both Cruz and Langer so embodied those characters that they had trouble getting other roles of a similar caliber. Ricky's coming out story was a TV milestone, sensitive and lived-in with palpable emotion.

As Raya's sidekick, Ricky appeared confident in himself, wearing eyeliner and hanging out in the girls' bathroom, but when the world struck back at him, his vulnerability just ripped through the screen. It hurt to see Ricky kicked out of his house by his family. To see him homeless, unsure of where he was going to be at night. To know that all of this hate came down on him just because he liked boys. Rayanne was a tricky character as well, the type of manic pixie life force that'd become a caricature in a couple of years. The schtick was hiding serious addiction problems. Angela seemed so privileged in comparison to these two kids, who had a raw deal from the world. (You can see that influence in Friday Night Lights, helmed by former My So-Called Life staffer Jason Katims.)

It was still Angela's show, but the richness of seeing it as an adult comes from the specific details surround Angela's world. The kids went to a crappy looking school that was falling apart. They wore the same clothes over and over again. The episode about a substitute teacher is a fairly uncanny parody of an after-school special that veers left. Angela's parents are people with their own foibles, worries, and insecurities. It's painfully obvious that their marriage is on the fritz because it is filled with passive aggressive sniping. Angela's sister is still a ghost, unjustly - and hilariously - ignored.

The storyline that had Angela ditching her former best friend Sharon Cherski is a minor note, but still sad - and despite the fact that they're not best friends anymore, Sharon's still a fantastic character, an archetypical good girl who enjoys having sex with her lunkhead footballer boyfriend. Sharon and Rayanne end up bonding, even though they don't mean to, over the fact that they both like having sex. It's more nuanced than the white swan-black swan binary, filled with real people mistakes and clumsy grasps, like, when Rayanne has sex with Jordan - a betrayal that was the driving force for the last few episodes, and hinted at the richer show beyond the first season, one that would feature a true ensemble of characters.

But we never got that second season. The hints of greatness in My So-Called Life as an ensemble, as a richer canvas than just a very specific story about one girl, feel a little like a loss. Yet on the other hand, it took only one season of TV to get to know Angela Chase, Rayanne Graff, Ricky Vasquez, Jordan Catalano, and their names still resonate. They still feel like friends that I knew once. They were there for me when I was figuring out the ultimate idea: how a person should be in the world. And as an adult, I feel no shame in admitting that a particular part of my worldview was shaped by the story of Angela Chase. She taught me how to feel. She taught me empathy.

Elisabeth Donnelly is the senior contributor to This Recording. She tumbls here and twitters here. She last wrote in these pages about Joe Wright's Hanna.

"All My Own Stunts" - The Artic Monkeys (mp3)

"The Hellcat Spangled Shalala" - The Artic Monkeys (mp3)

"Reckless Serenade" - The Artic Monkeys (mp3)

The new album from the Artic Monkeys, Suck It and See, will be released on June 6th.

 

In Which We Rubberize Femininity For Good

Her So-Called Life

by ELISABETH DONNELLY

Hanna

dir. Joe Wright
111 minutes

Every teenage girl is an assassin, wielding words like weapons, carving out their spaces in the world by defining what, exactly, they are not: their parents, their siblings, their peers, that boring kid in their math class. Joe Wright's surprisingly fun Euro-puff Hanna makes that idea thrillingly literal, with the titular teenage assassin (Saoirse Ronan) as a wolf girl, raised in the snowy Finnish wilderness by her wilderness dad Erik Heller (Eric Bana, still stupid-hot on a movie screen despite a documentary about his love of cars that had Jay Leno and Dr. Phil as talking heads). One day, Hanna's father tells her about the world – it's out there, beyond their safe little cabin in the woods, and when she's ready, she can flip a switch and come face to face with the big bad wolf, Cate Blanchett's CIA op Marissa, all rubberized femininity in perfect suits, low heels, and a mutating, vaguely southern accent.

Out in the world, Hanna may not know who she is, but her instincts and training kick in so that even though she's a feral albino hothouse flower, with ratty hair, bleached eyebrows, and eyes as blue as a summer sky, she can take down a soldier with the greatest of ease, snapping necks and firing shots like an angel of death. There's an air of fairy tale placed over the story – once Hanna is out in the world, she has to make her way to Germany to meet up with her father at Grimm's house, but it doesn't feel so meaningful. Every action set piece has a striking amount of quiet, taking place in cool steel halls in grey and angles. The Chemical Brothers' block rocking beats gurgle over the soundtrack anytime something slightly thrilling is about to take place, but the film really starts working once Hanna runs into an actual teenage girl.

British Sophie (Jessica Barden) is a teenage girl in the best, funniest ways: rolling her eyes at her parents, desperate for some company from a girl her own age, she is an innocent playing at being the blase, world-weary sophisticate that she is in her head, and she lunges for Hanna's friendship when they meet, suddenly, in Morocco. Sophie is a power, a force of nature, and she forces Hanna out into the world, sitting for dinners with her embarrassing family (including Olivia Williams as a hilarious hippie-cum-academic) and taking her along on double dates with boys.

The sleek cool of the CIA scenes gives way to sundappled arias of dreamy girlishness, with beautiful shots of Hanna basking in the sun, or Hanna and Sophie curled up in a camping tent making the late night sleepover confessions of true friendship, truly innocent at heart. Sophie is the teenage assassin that Hanna could be, and she's a reflection of what Hanna could be if she had a normal life. That dynamic gives the movie some juice that Cate Blanchett can't match, which is why Barden (who specializes in teenagers, like her divine fangirl Jodi from the terrific Tamara Drewe) basically walks off with the movie, and Hanna feels the need to protect her from the world and the evil Eurobaddies on her trail in their best polo whites, looking like extras from Michael Haneke's Funny Games.

But just as soon as Hanna has some momentum, it stops short. Hanna has gone off on a chase and ended up wandering through Berlin, looking for a gingerbread house in an abandoned theme park. And it's all very beautiful – as in the overheated piece of Oscar bait Atonement, Wright has a fine eye for composition and striking images, but he can't always get his visual acuity to match up to the story – and Ronan is one of those actresses who has enough soul in her eyes so that you care about her, but it's the exact point that the script gets convoluted and confusing, with no real goal in sight. The fairy tale themes overpower the actual plot, and Hanna is soon a teenage assassin adrift, stuck in a fog-smothered mossy green forest.

Hanna may be relatively calm and cool, Euro-sleek and a borderline campy joy in its way of getting Hanna to Grimm's house, but once we're there, we need a fair payoff. There's a lot you can do with a teenage assassin, and Hanna had such a high entertainment factor - a genuinely good time at the movies – that it was easy to forgive it its ambitions. Joe Wright should probably stop making Oscar bait period pieces with Keira Knightley, because he has a knack for trashy spy travelogues. Start with a Hanna sequel, where she teams up with Sophie to fight crime and also kiss cute boys, as bff teen girl assassins on a tear.

Elisabeth Donnelly is the senior contributor to This Recording. She last wrote in these pages about anxiety. She tumbls here and twitters here.

"Slowdance" - Matthew Dear (mp3)

"Little People (Black City) (Mark E remix)" - Matthew Dear (mp3)

"You Put A Smell On Me (Photocall remix)" - Matthew Dear (mp3)