The Driver is a film that is as stylish and mysterious as it is surprisingly compelling in its simplicity. The film is about a driver. That’s it. Specifically, a getaway driver played by Ryan O’Neil.
Driver from one aspect can be seen to be less about the titular character and more about the cop whose obsession with trying to arrest him has led him to bend the law to his own will so that he can finally catch the driver. This cop, played by Bruce Dern, is willing to resort to fraternising with other criminals to set up a sting that will catch the driver out and punish him for his crimes.
The detective would seem like the hero of the story, and aside from his willingness to subvert the law so that he can achieve his aims, he would and should be. But it’s the portrayal of the driver as a man with a moral code despite his illicit line of work that helps the viewer realise that O’Neil’s driver isn’t like the other getaway drivers. He has a conscience.
He doesn’t use guns, and he doesn’t live a luxurious life even though he is paid large amounts of cash for his involvement in the robberies that he’s a getaway driver for. And it’s the detective’s abrasive, smarmy personality that really cements him as the antagonist of the story in the eyes of the viewer.
The Driver (Ryan O’Neil on the left), and The Detective (Bruce Dern on the right) squaring off during an intense encounter.
The Driver’s story can be whittled down to a simple cop and robbers’ story, and one could watch it to enjoy that. But in the time that we’re in, where layered/nuanced story telling is a must for both television and film, once may want to watch The Driver as if it were a legacy-piece. A film that set the foundation for future film tropes that are still popular today, whose influences you can see in another more popular movie that would be released decades later.
And that film is Nicholas Winding Refn’s ‘Drive’.
If you’ve seen the 2011 cult-classic, then you will see The Driver and instantly be able to draw the connections between the two films.
There are the more obvious external elements that sync the two movies together. Case-in-point, the fact that the film’s protagonists have the exact same occupation, and that the film has that aesthetic of dimly lit streets that have that green tinge that gives you that ominous neo-noir feel to it, and a mysterious female lead that hovers over the protagonist as a driving force behind his actions in the story.
But, beneath all of that, there is the same presentation of a criminal character who is not like the other people in his line of work because he has a moral code that sets him apart and excuses him from being disliked by the audience and actually elevates him to the role of outlaw (much akin to the type of outlaw you see in a Western) rather than criminal offender.
Characters like Ryan O’Neil’s Driver could have been thought of as a dime-a-dozen, with people arguing that he was just portraying the stoic, unbreakable, hyper macho hero that was popular throughout the 70s, and expanded upon in the 80s.
Ryan Gosling as The Driver in the 2011 cult-classic Drive, portraying the same stoic anti-hero O’Neil did forty years earlier.
But when looking at The Driver through the lens of it being one of the inspirations behind Drive, you can say that it was the first of its kind in depicting a protagonist who is clearly on the wrong side of the law, but not on the wrong side of morality. It may be safe to say that you don’t get to Ryan Gosling’s getaway driver befriending and protecting a struggling single mother and her son whilst simultaneously planning a robbery with her ex-husband, had we not had Ryan O’Neil (in the 70s) refusing a robbery because he didn’t like to do jobs with people who he thought were violent brutes, whilst also trying to out manoeuvre a tenacious detective and escape capture.
The Driver may just be the first of its kind in showing us characters who ostensibly are on one side of the law externally, but through their beliefs and attitudes towards certain things, are actually on opposite sides of the law internally. Bruce Dern’s Detective may have been enforcing the law, but his disregard for showing any respect to the people who are working with or for him show him to be a contemptible character, contrasted by the Driver who breaks the law, but never imposes himself on other people, especially when the Detective actively tries to provoke him into a fist fight as a way of trying to arrest him.
We’ve had antiheroes before, and up until this point, the 1970s, the best example would have been the man with no name. Clint Eastwood, most notably in his trilogy of films with Sergio Leone. But they were films set in the Wild West. This is a film that is set during the latter half of the 20th century. The characters that appear in this film set during this period are not idyllic depictions of heroes and damsels you’d find in westerns, rather they’re mysterious, cold, and quite magnetic. You can’t tell why you find them interesting, but you know you do.
This is quite the case with the female lead in this film, known as the Player, played by Isabelle Adjolini. Adjolini played her role with a poise that made the viewer want to find out more about her, and what her stakes are in this came of cat and mouse between the Driver and the Detective. She joins both the Driver and the Detective in portraying a character that doesn’t seem to come from a reputable background, but at the very least has some sort of moral code that she tries to honour despite allusions to her having a sordid past.
The Player (Isabelle Adjolini) sat next to The Driver awaiting his next move during a chase scene.
Something that the film could have done more of is lean into the vehicular aspect of the film. With the film being titled as: ‘The Driver’ you don’t get as much driving sequences as you would like. The major driving/chase scene that is shown in the film is definitely adequate, but for modern audiences that have been exposed to the Fast and Furious franchise it may be a hard sell to get them to watch a film about a getaway driver that doesn’t have a majority of the film dedicated to car-chase sequences.
Another thing the film didn’t really expand on was the nature of the relationship between the Driver and the Player. When it comes to film and TV we come to expect that there is a romantic sub-plot packed into every movie and every show, and you wouldn’t be wrong to think that in this film, but apart from a chemistry that both the Driver and the Player share with one another, it’s never shown as developing into something more. The film does a great job of depicting a morally grey world, so maybe the inclusion of a romantic sub-plot would have not fit the tone of the film, but it did feel as though there could have been more to the relationship between the male and female lead.
The Driver, overall is a film that can be enjoyed either superficially, historically, or even in both ways. It’s a good time-piece for those who want to dive into the action genre of the 70s, and it’s also a good seminal film for those who are looking to see what films set the foundations for movies like: Drive, Bladerunner 2049, and other films that feature a morally grey protagonist.
If you want to watch a film that was one of many during the 70s that set the tone for a lot of the tropes we enjoy in our movies today, then The Driver may just be the film for you.