DRIVE MY CAR – A Review Of Hamaguchi’s Elegant Epic

Introduction

Written and directed by Ryûsuke Hamaguchi from a Haruki Murakami story, Drive My Car is an elegant epic. Not in the sense of an enormous fantasy tale that transports to untold worlds, but rather in how expansive the film’s exploration of grief, forgiveness, and self ends up being. Some may pass due to the 3-hour runtime, but doing so would be a grave mistake. Drive My Car is cinema at its finest, and a standout film of 2021.

Synopsis

Yûsuke Kafuku (Hidetoshi Nishijima) is a stage actor and director married to screenwriter Oto (Reika Kirishima). Their marriage is passionate but stained by the trauma of losing their 5-year-old daughter to pneumonia. Oto conducts an affair with an actor that Yûsuke is aware of, but never brings up.

After Oto dies suddenly, Yûsuke becomes unmoored, unable to return to the stage. Two years later he is invited to Hiroshima to oversee a staging of Anton Chekov’s “Uncle Vanya.” Once there, he begins to face his grief through an unlikely bond with his driver, Misaki Watari (Tôko Miura). 

Epic Intimacy

Drive My Car joins the growing number of recent films adapted from Haruki Murakami’s prose. Nonetheless, Murakami remains a difficult source to translate to the screen. The author’s penchant for internalized existentialism provides dense and moving prose that often contains little forward action.

Almost magically, Hamaguchi’s screenplay embraces that starting point, allowing the narrative to seep out and invite the viewer into the varied existential reflections of the characters as they methodically progress from internal to external. Speaking with the Hollywood Reporter, Hamaguchi notes that he:

“…didn’t really mimic Murakami’s style. But I figured I could still somehow arrive at where Murakami’s stories live…”

This particular story lives in the somewhat contradictory frame of epic intimacy. Drive My Car is epic in the sense that three hours are devoted to exploring Kafuku’s years of grief, pairing his experience with Watari’s cross-country quest for meaning. The intimacy comes from the minute observations between those two, and how they interact with the world.

With so much of the runtime occupied by car rides, the contained space motivates both to speak painful truths. Yes, Hamaguchi’s tale takes the story to expansive seaside vistas, but the lingering scenes occur within restrained locales. An apartment living room. A sterile rehearsal hall. A small dining room. A red Saab Turbo. Drive My Car’s marriage of epic emotional scale and elegant attention to the smaller tics of processing grief is one of its many cinematic magic tricks.

Visual Language

Hamaguchi and cinematographer Hidetoshi Shinomiya match the screenplay’s balancing act with an elegant visual language. One of the broad successes is that Hamaguchi and Shinomiya do not equate grief with a drained color palette. In the last 15 years, a whole host of filmmakers seem to have attempted to co-opt David Fincher’s monochromatism. The result has been a slew of ‘gritty’ or ‘realistic’ films devoid of anything but shades of grey.

Drive My Car is a lush corrective, a film about intense and painfully realistic emotions that embraces color. Exteriors in Hiroshima glow with seaside blues and greens. Kufuku’s hotel room contains a spectrum of woody browns and an impressive array of shades of black. More than anything though the red Saab that gives the movie its title pops out of every frame it’s in. That color choice underscores its centrality to the plot as both a motif and a location. 

Framing

Adding to the film’s beauty is Hamaguchi’s remarkable eye for framing. Matching the balance of epic scale and intimate emotional stakes, he dances between bringing the audience as close to the actors as can be with pulled-back sequences that linger on the distance between the camera and the characters.

Shooting so many conversations in the same car could become dull, but Hamaguchi continuously discovers fresh ways to frame them. A two-shot of front and back seats here. A tight close-up on someone talking or listening there. Even an extreme long shot of the Saab driving alongside a green field under power lines.

No matter the location, Hamaguchi identifies arresting images, often refracting his characters through mirrors, be they on apartment walls or reflective doors. In that imagery alone he builds a motif of reflectiveness that echoes Kafuku and Watari’s journeys. Watching Drive My Car is a masterclass in how to channel tone and theme into staggering cinematic compositions. It is central to making Drive My Car an elegant epic.

Gripping Performances

Pulling various components of writing and style together is a cast of performers without a false note. Each actor contributes to the tapestry that is Drive My Car’s investigation of sorrow. Yoo-Rim Park is scene-stealing as Lee Yoon-a, a mute dancer turned actress who has turned to theater to rediscover her artistry following a painful miscarriage.

Masaki Okada delivers a brash and perfectly immature performance as Kôji Takatsuki, a former A-list star who had an affair with Oto and now spirals into alcoholism and probable sex addiction. In her limited screen time during what amounts to a prologue, Reika Kirishima is moving as Oto, projecting quiet yearning in her delivery and glances. She makes one understand why Kafuku would desperately want to stay with her, even as she was so unfaithful. 

Still, this is Nishijima and Miura’s showcase. Each manages simmering agony and are both ultimately alone in the world. Premature deaths have removed people, a wife, and a mother respectively, from their lives who were both toxic and integral.

Their friendship delivers on the promise perverted by travesties such as Driving Miss Daisy and Green Book that employed the driver-passenger model to reinforce racially suspect narratives. Here it is the simple tale of two outwardly stoic, yet inwardly frenzied people, wanting to be understood, listened to, and held. Not in a romantic way, but in the sense of feeling close to another human.

The Saab is their temple, and in it, they worship on the altar of each other’s souls. To elaborate any more on how they reach such a point from their standoffish beginnings would spoil what is the most moving dramatic arc of the year. You must experience it with an open heart.

Conclusion

With all the talk of movie runtimes being a bane for audiences, Drive My Car emerges as a salve. Here is a film that is 3 hours long, and has within it not a single frame, narrative beat, or line that shouldn’t be there. It is the cinematic equivalent of peace. There is pain, humor, and above all, endless beauty. Drive My Car is an elegant epic, and not to be missed.

Drive My Car had its world premiere at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival where it was in competition for the Palme d’Or and won the award for Best Screenplay. The film was released in the US on November 24, 2021.

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