Drive (2011) is another transformation to witness. We start with a contaminated character as usual. This time, our main character is poisoned by greed, anger, and violence. Some silver linings accompany Driver, traits which will in the end stick through with the audience and characters alike. Love, passion, compassion, and confidence. Driver might seems like a gentleman at times, and don’t get me wrong, at times he is. However, when you watch this specific scene in the movie, you realize just how much our Driver is contaminated by violence, anger, and greed. Just as contaminated by these traits our character is, he also goes through a lot to help the people he cares about. He puts his life at risk multiple times for Irene, Benicio, and the guy he works for at the shop.

Saddening to watch, our main character leads a dangerous life and is under the impression that it’s possible to lead a double life. When you choose danger, danger is in every part of your life… period. There is no peace when you give darkness an instance in your life. It permeates all around, even if you don’t want it to. Even if you keep that part of your life hidden from everyone around you, it always finds a way to reach the light, and once it does, it makes sure to dampen, or even extinguish all of it. Whatever obscurity you decide to live with in this life, you’ll need a full understanding of it, its repercussions, and just like when handling any fire, how to control it so that it itself does not extinguish the life around it.

Our main character learns that the hard way. He lets his darkness get out of control. Drive (2011) holds an array of scenes which will make you understand how bad things really can get in life. A dad in prison, a life full of murderous events, a husband who doesn’t care at all about you, are all events in this life which can be real if you let them be. All events that can be fueled by a self, all events that can be generated through the darkness in others, all events that can be pushed into reality by other people, all parts of darkness, yes. To be able to lead your life into a hole lies solely on your person’s own being, although some people are easier to push over a ledge than others. These are the kind of characters you’ll meet in Drive (2011). Generators of misery and victims who might have, or, might have not had the tools to decide and not be victims (we don’t know much about their pasts to discern this.).

You will see a whole lot of blood while watching Drive (2011). You will also see what pure love and compassion are when demonstrated by characters whose cores’ are unfortunately tainted. You will see how these traits of purity invariably remain strong through the character’s life as their silver linings. It’s rare to see characters who after an insurmountable amount of pain don’t change their ways. Sure one could perhaps think of a few characters in history who might have never given any care to change regardless of their experiences. While watching Drive (2011), and seeing the amount of pain the main characters go through for the people they care for and how they handle the ending in the movie, you’ll know that Irene and the Driver are the kind of characters who chose change rather than the continuation of enduring and inflicting pain.

In order to keep my writing fun and intuitive, I will not be taking on the same format for each of our reviews. Instead I will be writing these reviews as they pour out of my soul. Let’s get started. I want to point out the twisted and unequivocally incorrect life our main character takes when we meet him. There are a couple of scenes in the movie that let you see exactly how f’ed up this guy is in the head. Surely not your average superhero, hell, I’d even say this guy is more of a villain than a superhero.

Let’s start by going over what many people watching Drive (2011) might deem as a kind of a “badass” into what reality in a correct world is. Our main character is many things; and the worst we can see at the beginning is that he is a professional get away driver. This is the first horrid trait of the Driver that we discover. He helps people get away from crime scenes, no questions asked, just give him the money and he’ll get you out of the crime scene safely. Sure, the scenes in the movie make it seem so badass, a getaway driver in his souped up car driving away through the night evading authority in the most suave way possible. What kind of messed up childhood kid wouldn’t that appeal to?

It’s a messed up world afterall, we all have to be thankful for the things we have, however, when you come from down below, say the gutters, you don’t really pay attention to what life “could be”. Instead, you just focus on survival, and live for the moment, there’s no such thing as planning for tomorrow. It’s just do, do, and do. There’s nothing special about it, nothing other than living for the moment, which you almost always regret the next day, but hey, life goes on. Sadly, this is the case of many people who don’t plan for the future, or rather don’t protect what is most precious in this life.

Our driver was not gentle; he was quite indeed the opposite, he was a murderer all throughout the movie. In many cases, he did not choose to walk away. It’s sad to know this is actually a reality for many people. People who choose violence over peaceful gentleness. People who choose to strive rather than the hindmost place. People who choose jaded schemes over the sane satisfaction of their lot. It’s painful to read this.

Anyhow, I think that for the most part, you’ll enjoy the movie from whichever side you are looking at it from. If you have traversed already into the safer side, then you’ll know the pain and struggle going through that transition is like, if you’re looking at the movie from the other side, you’ll be left with the Driver’s silver lining. Watching from the side which hasn’t transitioned into the safer side of this, you’ll be extremely appealed to the Driver’s passion, and the care he puts into Irene and Benecio, you’ll think to yourself that he’s a nice guy even though he’s murdering people, they are all people who are trying to either hurt him or Irene and her family. Well two wrongs don’t make a right. They never will.

That still won’t stop you from not being sucked in by the Driver’s passion for Irene and Benecio. All throughout the movie, you’ll see how a void was being filled in the Driver by Irene and Benecio, you’ll see how important they become to the Driver. You’ll be reminded how you have someone you care about that much, especially if there’s that girl you have a crush on, haha. I know, it seems cute, though, not really, I guess what I’m trying to get at is that Driver had little people to care for so much it seems. That’s where his obsession came from and his lack of control.

Let me point out a few scenes which were magical in this movie, scenes which make the driver and the audience realize something. Scenes that stick in your mind even though you haven’t watched the movie in years.

This scene opens your eyes simultaneously to both, the Driver’s brightest and darkest sides all in one enclosed space. A contrast between two different ends of a spectrum, horrible dark violence and passion for someone you love. It’s magical how both ends could be depicted in that small space of the elevator. Think about how small that space is and how two such opposing traits could be depicted all in that same space. That’s the magic of this scene.

There’s this scene in Drive where the Driver has a moment of realization. This moment where the subconscious part of him starts awakening and he knows that his life will never be the same. In this moment, Driver’s subconscious understands why he’s different, he understands that he will never be like the men that are before him, he knows that regardless of who he’s becoming thanks to these poor array of choices, he’ll always have a differentiating factor in him. In this scene, that differentiating factor takes a hold of Driver and paralyzes him in front of the truth.

Driver sees in front of him how these men are all parading around wealth and fortune, something that up until that time in the movie, Driver also partially craves and desires. This sudden sadness overcomes him and stops him from doing anything at all in that moment, except for staring at the pathetic scene. He stares at the scene through that glass window in total dissatisfaction.

Knowing how deep in the void Driver was at that moment. Just the mere fact of having something in common with these repugnant monsters all froze him still at that doorway. In that moment, with that mask on, blood boiling, ready to end everyone of his enemies in that room, he frozen in silence. One of my favorite parts of the scene is when he arrived at the door, they only focus his masked face, and more than that, the only human aspect to the scene are his eyes. You can see them moving, how they give out a look of disbelief. It’s that moment which will be mirrored throughout the rest of his life on similar occasions.

I hadn’t weighed in on know how deeply sad the scene before his eyes really was at that moment. I mean, I knew it was pathetic for sure, only because I knew the means in which these men had acquired their wealth. I didn’t weigh the sorrow in it. That is, how it’s actually possible to live a whole life without caring about anything other than wealth and who you’re sleeping with tonight. That’s a reality.

I’m not entirely sure why this scene took significance after a couple of weeks after writing this review. It must have been because I had spent more time thinking about the duality our characters lived in. This particular scene hit me while I was washing dishes. Lol, I have no idea why. Anyhow… there’s this short poem about a Scorpion and a Frog…

It was meant to teach a lesson. That lesson is to never trust a stinger. You see, the frog helps the scorpion get over the river, and while doing so, the scorpion stings the frog. The scorpion makes it to the other side and the frog dies. This why you shouldn’t go around trusting scorpions.

Brings me to my next point, which is the twisted mind of our main character. He could have never taken care of Irene and Benecio with these thoughts in mind. Our character wore a jacket with a scorpion on his back throughout the whole movie.

Of course, there is the ending scene. Driver is one guy fighting a mob. He would do anything for Irene and Benecio to be safe. He messed up the moment he started taking jobs for criminals though. His greed was the downfall of every chance he had with Irene and Benicio, night i have been a better kind of greed, maybe he wanted to become a millionaire in a safer way, then he could have got a chance. Getting mixed up in the criminal world though is no joke, and sooner or later you pay for your mistakes. You never get to lead a good life unless you quit what you ought to quit. It’s a nasty world. Sooner or later, that world makes its way into the people you love, and you are faced with horrible choices. Better than all the gold is the hindmost place.

Driver doesn’t know this, and so instead he chooses the easy money. In the ending scene, we get to see exactly the kind of disgusting people he’s dealing with. They are willing to destroy him because of who he is. Over a couple of dollars, they can make sure he never sees the girl he loves again. When they sit down at that table, Driver knows that he will probably never see Irene again, and he knows that his life is quite turned around forever. Pretty much every scene in this movie is terribly sad.

This scene is one of them. Instead of having the ability to be with who’d he’d do anything to protect, he gets stuck without them, mostly again, because of a couple of dollars. In that restaurant you could see how exhausted Driver was from running and fighting people left and right. What Driver was not expecting was to get stabbed in the back when he walked out and handed over the money. This scene also serves the audience the lesson to never trust a person who’s willing to kill your loved ones without remorse. As soon as Driver turns his back on him and shows him the stash of money, this guy stabs him.

The overflowing mysticism this scene leaves us with is when Driver looks pale dead in his car. We are left to assume he’s dead, and suddenly he bursts out back into life. This could be interpreted in a couple of ways, one of them being that this awakening is a metaphor to his spiritual self becoming realized into a higher form. Driver left behind people he loved, Irene, Benicion, and the person he was. He awoke into a better reality. At least, that’s the way I see it.

There’s this part in the movie where Driver takes Benicio and Irene out for a drive in his car. They go along for a long ride and what is a joyful afternoon. You can really see Driver’s best side here. You can see his love for Irene and Benicio and that he truly enjoys being with them. It’s so sad, the fact that he cannot become apart from this criminal world. He could have everything a person in this life could possibly want if he left it behind. The worst part is that Driver was actually a decent mechanic. It’s quite literally insane what money can do to people.

These traits were all of Driver’s silver linings and what made it possible for him to overcome his darker side. Throughout the whole movie, you can see how warm he is toward Irene and Benecio. Even after Irene’s husband gets back from jail, he sticks around to make sure they are ok. When he learns how deeply involved in crime Irene’s husband is, Driver sticks around to try and make things better for them, even though he might have ended up making things worse. Benicio’s Dad is murdered.

Anyhow, the moments that Driver sticks through being around Irene’s husband despite how much he likes her plays into his compassion. Instead of walking away and letting Irene’s husbands take care of their problems like he should, he sticks around and tries to help him. Of course, the real problem was that they were both still criminals.

Indefinitely, what these traits get at is the fact that they serve as a compass. In your darkest moments, you’ll have something to hold on to and guide you. To learn them with friends or family is the only way. To be reminded of them by watching a movie is just a reinforcement. If you are fortunate enough to have a family or friends, why not practice these as well?

Overall, Driver is a terribly sad and depressing movie. It will however teach you a lot of good things. There are joyful moments in which you will be able to see what really is important in this life. You can see that what makes people complete in this life is the company of someone they love and not anything of the material kind. In these moments of joy, you can see that everything that is important is where the Driver is happy & voidless; all other moments are violent, saddening and lead to nothing but misery.

I highly recommend watching Driver (2011) if you haven’t already. Not only will the movie keep you following an interesting plot that assimilates reality, it will also open your eyes toward what matters in life.