The restrained and atmospheric DRIVE, which stars both Ryan Gosling and Carey Mulligan, was the perfect fix for my addiction to a certain type of offbeat thriller. There is familiar and seductive formula to it. Find an actual profession (in this case stunt driving) and transpose it to the world of criminal enterprise (in this case getaway driving). This transposition seems to celebrate the anti-hero’s success at creating a life parallel to but distinct from the lives that most of us are required to live. Then a complication is introduced that explodes the ingeniously constructed alternate lifestyle which for a little while we admired and envied. By punishing the effort to exist alongside the system rather than within it, the primacy of the system is reasserted. But the hero survives, still ingenious enough to create a new parallel way of living – somewhere down the road.

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