You presented me with a singular movie-going experience recently. Ryan Gosling is undoubtedly a hugely talented actor with a broad range, but it was especially enjoyable to watch him play a role that included a very small amount of actual talking. I find the striking figure that Gosling cuts undermined whenever he opens his mouth - as he consistently sounds very much like the actual character he played in DRIVE: a guy who might roll out from under your car covered in grease and say in his signature breathy, phlegmy cant - "brakes'r shot" - a masculine, recently awakened Jackie Kennedy with bronchitis.
Be that as it may, it was a pleasure to watch him flex his muscles (theatrical and otherwise), crack his knuckles (his signature move in the film), and watch a buncha people get blown to high heaven. The body count to character ratio in this film is alarmingly high. By my count, nine people were killed (shot, stabbed, stomped to death, forcibly drowned, impaled or otherwise eviscerated) in a film with approximately eight major characters. There was a A LOT of violence in this film. So much so that it presented an all-too clear divide in theater 1 at the Landmark at the Westside Pavilion; a theater that is, for whatever reason, lousy with the elderly at all shows starting before 9pm. Navigating the sheer number of walkers, canes and wheelchairs in the lobby and Lexuses with handicapped placards in the parking garage is a tricky exercise requiring a Gosling-esque deftness of hand-eye coordination.
While many members of the audience were hugely engaged, even bursting into spontaneous applause at one point as Gosling made short order of a pair of armed, malice-perpetrating hooligans by turning their own weapons against them, at least a dozen people left the theater. These dissatisfied patrons included one elderly woman seated in the front row, who, while lurching into an upright position with the aid of her walker during a particularly quiet scene, ripped a very loud fart, easily audible from our seats in Row J. (This classic old-person-getting-out-of-a-chair fart was particularly favored by my late grandfather, who, while not acknowledging that it was happening in any way, would look you in the eye as he farted, testing the will of your decorum.) This set off a burst of muffled tittering amongst quite a few patrons as, her verdict on the picture audibly rendered, the woman walkered her way out of the theater.
In spite of the gratuitous violence and near pants-pooping of a fellow theater patron, I enjoyed the film, and, more importantly, was hugely proud/unnerved to be seeing it in Los Angeles. This movie pulled no punches on the city, presenting a gritty downtown, Echo Park and far eastern reaches of the Valley; neighborhoods of which I've barely plumbed the depths, neighborhoods I wouldn't be comfortable hot-air ballooning over. The thing about this movie is that it totally validated the deep, institutional unease I feel about this city. For a movie with a Canadian star directed by a guy from Denmark (outsourcing as we do every job in America these days), it handily put its finger on the pulse of, if not my Los Angeles, but the Los Angeles I fear and know is out there. And that was the crux of it - the kind sof violence shown in this film is violence I feel on a very deep level is happening somewhere in LA all the time. People getting stabbed in parking garages? Check. People getting shot while robbing pawn shops? Check. Christina Hendricks getting blown away by a shotgun at extremely close range? Double Check. (This scene was particularly disturbing, as someone stood in a parking lot outside the bathroom window of a motel she and Gosling were in, aiming at her through one of those LA-special Venetian slat windows that have always inexplicably freaked me out. Now I can bolster this irrational fear with a little legitimacy.)
One of the films' strengths was that it so gracefully captured the pleasure and Lone Ranger-essence one feels of driving on LA's empty roads at night. In a few scenes, Gosling goes for a ride in his customized, 70s El Camino-ish thing, and I very much got it. I've felt that feeling, granted, not on the way to or from a bank heist, but regardless, it is liberating.
Driving home after consuming a prodigious amount of Mexican food (and margaritas) later in the day, I channeled my inner Gosling and flew down the newly resurfaced stretch of Wilshire Boulevard by the Los Angeles Country Club, a view of Beverly Hills and Downtown twinkling in the distance glimmered before me. I rowed through the gears, pushing my car's wheezing turbo to its limits -all I needed was a pair of driving gloves, some phlegm in my throat, and the doll from Lars and The Real Girl in the passenger seat, and I just might achieve Gosling status.
And then, acting up as it has over the past couple of months, my ten-year old gas gauge failed me. The light never having even come on, I straight-up ran out of gas, and chugged to a stop on Beverly Drive. Ryan Gosling I'll never be. I sighed, and called AAA.
Sinerely,
Dear Crabby
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