Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Walter Hill
Starring: Ryan O'Neal, Bruce Dern, Isabelle Adjani, Ronee Blakley, Matt Clark,
Joseph Walsh, Rudy Ramos
In the great New York car chases of 1970s Hollywood (The French Connection;
The Seven-Ups), the bustling streets prove a menace to the heroic cop in pursuit of
criminals. While the crims don’t care if they crash into that woman
pushing a pram or run over the fruit seller whose watermelons just got
splattered all over their windscreen, the cop has to look out for the
general public. With his 1978 magnum opus The Driver, Walter Hill flips this dynamic on its head. His car chases
don’t play out on the teeming streets of rush hour NYC but on the empty
boulevards of nocturnal Los Angeles. This time it's the criminal who is
at a disadvantage with nowhere to hide. Unable to shake off two pursuing
cop cars, the movie's antihero, a getaway driver named in the credits as
simply The Driver (Ryan O'Neal), decides to challenge them to a
game of chicken. He knows it's a game he'll win, that the cops will
swerve out of his way at the last moment. The cops aren't willing to die
for their job, whereas The Driver is, because he lives for his
job.
As the police detective on his tail points out, The Driver has nothing
else going on in his life but his work. He doesn't seem to spend his
money, living in an unfurnished hovel and wearing the same couple of
cheap polyester suits. A more conventional movie might reveal that he's
collecting his earnings to put his kid sister through college, or
because he's in debt to the mob. But Hill's film is a stripped down
thriller that takes its cues from the French crime movies of
Jean-Pierre Melville, featuring men devoted to their work and nothing else.
Another man devoted to his work is The Detective (Bruce Dern).
He knows The Driver is responsible for the LAPD's inability to catch the
perps behind a recent spate of bank jobs, but he's too quick to catch
him. Like Wile E. Coyote, he figures that if he can't chase this
Roadrunner, he'll set a trap and lie in wait. The Detective's equivalent
of a fake tunnel painted on the side of a cliff is to blackmail captured
bank robber Glasses (Joseph Walsh) into enlisting The Driver to
serve as his getaway man. The plan is to lure The Driver right into the
waiting hands of The Detective.
The Driver is a movie about cocky extroverts and
confident introverts. The Detective is all bravado and bluster, and Dern
plays him like a beatnik who somehow ended up a square. He's the classic
maverick cop, working outside the rules to get the job done. Hill
interrogates this idea through The Detective's underling, Red
Plainclothesman (Matt Clark), who disapproves of The Detective's
tactics. Red Plainclothesman has a wife and kid, and wants to keep his
head down until he can draw his pension (Hill wisely excised an opening
scene that introduces RP as a rookie; it's far more effective if we
believe he's been putting up with The Detective's BS for a few years by
this point). The Detective might mock The Driver for his lack of a life,
but it seems he's equally unburdened by any forces outside his
occupation. These are two men who believe they're the smartest cookies
in the jar. The Driver seems to know he's being set up by Glasses, but
takes the job anyway, and we get the impression he's so confident that
he wants to rub it in The Detective's face. The Detective is arrogant,
but The Driver is confident. The Detective talks a lot of shit. The
Driver is as silent as Valentino. Those who talk a lot are often masking
insecurities. Those who don’t feel the need to speak usually have things
sussed.
Falling into the latter category is The Player (Isabelle Adjani), a young French woman who acted as the inside man for the film's
opening heist. She might actually be the smartest cookie in this
particular jar, and Hill uses her to slyly mock the conventions of the
American cops and robbers genre. As she plays The Detective and The
Driver off against one another, she wounds them in the way only a pretty
French girl can, finding out what they value and making fun of it. When
The Detective tries to pull his Bad Cop routine on her, she simply looks
at him as though he's something she just stepped in (in the way only a
pretty French girl can) and his macho shell cracks for a moment that
suggests were it not for his badge he'd be tempted to knock her out.
She's even crueller to The Driver. When he refuses to work a second job
with her, she mocks the only thing she can find in his sparse apartment,
the "cowboy music" he listens to on a small transistor radio, his only
connection with humanity.
Making The Player French isn't some random choice, it's a clear nod to
how the filmmakers of the French New Wave deconstructed American genre
pictures. Like those Gallic directors, The Player has contempt for
America, but she also seems to be seduced by it. A more conventional
movie would have her become The Driver's love interest, but The Player
is more interested in money and survival. Yet there's still a tension
between The Driver and The Player, though they're unwilling to act on
any physical feelings they might harbour, lest they jeopardise the
bigger game they're playing. Plus, they've been around the block enough
times to know they can't trust anyone in this underworld.
Hill might be bucking conventions, but unlike Melville, he's still an
American action director and The Driver features three of
the best automotive action set-pieces of the '70s (and that's really
saying something). There's the opening pursuit, homaged by Nicolas
Winding Refn in Drive; a climactic chase through LA's iconic 2nd street tunnel (also seen in
THX 1138, Blade Runner and The Terminator, to name but a few of the movies that have utilised it); and best of
all, a bravura sequence in which The Driver proves his chops to Glasses
by treating his vehicle like a stock car in an elevated car park. The
latter is a classic example of defining character through action, and it
tells us a lot more about The Driver and his worldview than any of the
sparse dialogue he's given. The Driver has an almost Nietzschean
superiority complex, considering himself an ubermensch in the LA
underworld. He loves his job, but he hates the sort of lowlifes it
forces him to fraternise with.
Hill likely saw how Kubrick employed O'Neal in
Barry Lyndon, getting the best from the limited actor by giving him as little
dialogue as possible (in Kubrick's film, O'Neal is far better as the
sullen Lyndon of the film's second half than as the cocky young pup we
initially encounter). Despite O'Neal's very American pretty boy looks,
he's transformed into a Melvillean antihero – all he needs is a
trenchcoat. As The Player, Adjani is similarly given few lines, as Hill
recognises that she can say more with a pout than many actresses could
with an impassioned monologue. There's an entire film occurring off
screen in which The Player is the protagonist, Hill keeping us guessing
as to just what she's up to. Is she an innocent seduced by criminality
or a femme fatale who has been waiting for the sort of opportunity now
presented by The Driver and The Detective? Frankly, I don't think you
cast Adjani if it's the former (it's easy to imagine Hill making this
movie with Charles Bronson in the lead, in which case Jill Ireland would
have been The Player and the character would have lost all of her
ambiguous shading). The showy roles are tellingly given to the arrogant
extrovert characters – Dern's The Detective, constantly bigging himself
up while putting down others, and Teeth (Rudy Ramos), an
associate of Glasses whose arrogance threatens to ruin the endeavours of
everyone else (I've always thought Brian de Palma was referencing Teeth
through his character of Benny Blanco in Carlito's Way, right down to the train station finale).
Ever since the '90s heyday of Tarantino and his clones, it's become a
tiresome cliché to deconstruct crime movies in a postmodern manner.
Hill's film is two decades older but still feels fresher and more vital
than any of its '90s descendants, likely because it was both dissecting
a contemporary filmic landscape while understanding it had to appeal to
the people who were buying tickets for such movies. It's a very smart
film, but also a very thrilling movie, a rollercoaster that can be
relished in the moment and contemplated weeks later. The Walter Hill of
this era made bubblegum movies, but they gave you so much to chew on you
never wanted to spit them out.
