'Drive My Car' Review
The long and winding road to healing.
Drive My Car - 2021 - Directed by Ryusuke Hamaguchi - Drama - Unrated - 2h 59m
If there ever could be a polite movie about grief and resentment, Drive My Car is it. This is a soft-spoken expansion of the compact Haruki Murakami short story of the same name. But while Murakami’s story can be finished in maybe one hour, director Ryusuke Hamaguchi swells it to a daunting three hours, and I’m not sure all three hours are entirely justified.
That’s not to say the film isn’t beautiful or well-made. It is. It has a simple, stripped down style that mirrors the serenity of Murakami’s writing. Characters exist in a sort of emotional zero gravity, floating between grief and a resigned determination to carry on as if nothing is wrong. Sweeping emotions and exaggerated drama are consciously held back, favoring a hushed stillness that’s reflective of where these characters want to be — safe and stable, as far removed from their painful emotions as possible.
The easiest escape route for them is through performance. Yusuke Kafuku is a stage actor who discovers his wife, Oto, has been sleeping with other men — before she dies suddenly of a cerebral hemorrhage. Haunted by the shock of loss and the inability to confront Oto about her infidelity, he takes on a job to direct a production of Anton Chekov’s Uncle Vanya. His choice to direct instead of act is a significant one, as he later reveals that performing Chekov is terrifying because “it drags out the real you.”
The use of Uncle Vanya itself expands from a small mention in the short story to a larger framing device in the film. Without the benefits of words on a page, Hamaguchi had to find a way to articulate the inner turmoil of his characters and uses direct lines from the play to guide the subtext. These lines are read by Oto, recorded on cassette tape before her death, to help Kafuku rehearse in his car. It’s an effective storytelling tactic that hangs heartache over the entire film like an unshakable fog.
It’s around the halfway point that you might feel yourself drifting. The film slowly builds itself with extended scenes of understated misery, play rehearsals, and characters reflecting on past events. None of it is poorly conceived — it’s poetically written and executed with a plain matter-of-factness that feels believable — but it is a lot to ask. Could the film have achieved the same atmosphere with a shorter running time? I believe so. I lightly dozed off for a few minutes (shame on me, I know) but was able to snap back into consciousness as the film reached some breakthrough emotional moments of self-confrontation — and I still felt the power of them.
Drive My Car is a meditation in an almost literal sense. It moves with slow tenderness while uprooting the harsh realities of unresolved emotional damage. In the wrong hands, it’s material that could easily fall into cheap melodrama. Hamaguchi avoids that familiar route. He takes a more patient one instead — and demands the audience do the same. The film will give back by the end, finding light in the dark tunnel of sorrow — assuring us that it will all be okay.
Drive My Car is playing only in theaters.
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