It’s very easy to say why a mediocre movie is good or bad. It takes little to sway things one way or the other. One great performance or sequence. Even just a good mood as an audience can sway things. It’s much harder to explain when a very good movie isn’t great. Part of the problem is that I spend much of the time explaining why I don’t think it’s great rather than all the reasons why it is very good. This is going to be one of those Reactions. Drive My Car is a movie I strongly recommend. It’s a journey of a movie, full of profound emotional moments and compelling characters. Despite being 3 hours long, I never got antsy to get out of the movie.
I do have some trouble understanding why this movie is the ride or die pick this year, with an almost unprecedented Oscar nomination. A tiny foreign movie. Didn’t win the Palme d’Or at Cannes. Had a distribution studio with little modern Oscar history. No international stars. Fairly obscure director. This rode its way to a Best Picture nomination off grass roots love alone. And that’s where I’m confused and start to pick at it. I don’t think this is a very focused movie. There are several subplots that don’t serve much purpose. They enrich the overall feel of the movie. Some of this feels like stalling for time. The length of the movie is a feature in some ways. It’s using the TV trick of the more time you spend with characters, they more you connect with them. I don’t think the emotional journey would feel satisfying had I spent only 2 hours with the movie. That does lead me to question if a film is the best medium for this story. Apparently, director Ryusuke Hamafguchi’s last film was 5 hours long, so this feels like a trend. I’ve seen a lot of 90-minute indie movies that, had they stretched them out to 3 hours, I would’ve felt much stronger about them by the end. It’s natural. Time creates familiarity and connection. Internally, I set the bar higher the longer a film goes. In that sense, the rate at which Drive My Car got more satisfying over time lagged behind where I think it should’ve. I hope that makes sense. A Stronger movie would’ve got me feeling this strongly in much less time.
In terms of long movies, Drive My Car is much more of an Amadeus than a Paris, Texas. Amadeus is a magic trick of pacing. It flies by, despite its length. I have trouble understanding how it’s so long, because it doesn’t seem like that much is happening. Paris, Texas is a movie I adore. The first half is painfully slow and just about building up the characters. The second half is so great that I forgive the somewhat tedious first half. Everything from the early parts pay off like a slot machine late. Drive My Car’s emotional climax didn’t hit me as hard as it needed to. I was quite engaged from scene to scene rather than experiencing highs and lows. The movie does have some homework that would help with appreciating it more. I don’t know the play Uncle Vanya. Knowing that would really help. Knowing Japanese would really help too. And I’m not being glib. This film is centered around a multi-lingual production of Uncle Vanya. Much of the cast spoke different languages. Knowing when two people were saying things the other couldn’t understand would’ve helped a lot. I don’t hear the difference between Japanese, Korean, and Mandarin. Just knowing the little English they spoke didn’t do much. A good counter-example is The Handmaiden from 2016. One dub I saw of that color-coded the Japanese and Korean parts. Given how they were examples of high and low status in the film, that helped tremendously.
Verdict: Strongly Recommend
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