Drive My Car: A Review

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT/SKIP IT. A flawed but technically solid arthouse venture that is undermined by some grandiosely absurd plot points. Those with conventional tastes should stay away from this three-hour existential meditation, but those who love the arthouse should find something to like about this movie.

In recent years, no doubt in an effort to bolster their diversity bona fides, the Academy Awards have nominated Asian films or Asian-themed films for the Best Picture Award, with mixed results.

It started with Parasite, the brilliant 2019 Korean film from director Bon Joon-ho which was nominated for six Oscars and miraculously beat out stiff competition to win Best Picture, Best International Feature Film, Best Director and Best Original Screenplay.

In 2020, the middling Minari, which was directed by Korean-American Lee Isaac Chung and featured a Korean cast and language, was elevated by pandering critics and rose to get six Oscar nominations including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Original Screenplay and Best Original Score, with its only win being Youn Yuh-jung for Best Supporting Actress.

This year, Drive My Car, a Japanese film directed by Ryusuke Hamaguchi, has become the critical darling and garnered a Best Picture, Best International Film, Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar nominations.

Drive My Car, which is currently available to stream on HBO Max and Amazon, is neither the masterpiece that was Parasite, nor the arthouse fool’s gold that was Minari. It’s somewhere in the middle. It’s not great, but it’s also not terrible, which in the context of the atrocity that is cinema in 2021, means it’s worthy of a Best Picture Oscar nomination, as mediocrity is now magnificence.

The film is best described as an existential relationship drama that uses Anton Chekhov’s play ‘Uncle Vanya’ as its emotional anchor/blueprint/spirit animal as it tells the story of Yusuke Kafuku (Hidetoshi Nishijima), a theatre actor and director in Japan who ponders life, death and everything in between.

Kafuku has played Uncle Vanya extensively and has unlocked the inner workings and rhythms of Chekhov’s masterpiece. As he drives around Japan in his red SAAB, he listens to a recording of his wife speaking all of the lines of the play, except Vanya’s – which Kafuku recites with lifeless precision.

In order to protect the cinematic experience of watching Drive My Car, I will avoid all spoilers – no matter how big or small. But I will say this, one of the film’s great weaknesses is its insistence on grandiosely absurd plot points to propel the story. There are three I am thinking of and when you see them, you’ll know what I’m talking about. These three events/revelations are so theatrically contrived that they undermine the potential power of the film.

That said, the movie does have a lot going for it. Namely, it’s exquisitely crafted, particularly by cinematographer Hidetoshi Shinokiya. For example, there is one shot of Kafuku and his driver Misaki (Toko Miuri) down at a waterfront area that is so gloriously composed it nearly made my heart explode with its artistry.

In another scene, which is crucial to the story, Hamaguchi and Shinokiya place the camera between two people as they have a conversation in the back seat of a moving car, so there’s no over-the-shoulder cuts, or two shots, instead the viewer is placed deep inside the conversation and the actors actually seem to be talking directly to the camera. This approach in this scene – and only in this scene, is brilliant as it imposes an intimacy on the conversation that is deliriously compelling and greatly elevates the drama.

The film’s use of sound and silence is equally impressive, as it subtly weaves a technically masterful spell upon the viewer. In one critical sequence near the end of the film, a monologue is given in silence, and it is the most deeply moving moment in the entire movie. There’s another moment when silence is thrust upon the viewer so suddenly that I wondered if I had accidentally hit the mute button on my remote control. That sound design could use silence to shake a viewer in this way is an impressive feat.

Drive My Car is unquestionably an arthouse film in style and substance, and it’s a deliberately, if not languidly, paced three hours. For example, the opening act of the film, which could be considered the prelude, takes 45 minutes. So, 45 minutes into the movie, the opening-credits role. The following 2 hours and 15 minutes also takes its time but to Hamaguchi’s credit, never flounders.

The cast are, if not spectacular, then at least engaging and likeable. Nishijima’s Kafuku is a perplexing character who makes some seemingly strange choices, but he never loses your attention, which is no small feat considering he’s in nearly every shot of the film.

The rest of the cast are not particularly spectacular, but they also aren’t bad.

The one thing I truly loved about Drive My Car is that after it ended, I kept thinking about it. I kept ruminating and pondering its philosophical and artistic musings. I also kept thinking about Chekhov – one of my all-time favorite writers not just for his plays but for his phenomenal short stories.

Like Kafuku in Drive My Car, I too have discovered profound personal and philosophical insights in the works of Chekhov (as well as in Shakespeare), which have changed my life.

Drive My Car is not the cinematic equivalent of a Chekhov play or short story, but that’s a high bar to measure it against. It’s also not on the same level as the masterpiece that is Parasite, but that again is an unfair comparison.

Instead, Drive My Car is a flawed (maybe even very flawed), but ultimately compelling, technically well-made, solid arthouse film. If your tastes run the more conventional, this movie is most definitely not for you. But if you enjoy the arthouse and have a particular love of Chekhov and ‘Uncle Vanya’, then watching Drive My Car will be three hours well-spent.

©2022

Minari: A Review

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!****

My Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. An over-hyped venture that ultimately underwhelms.

Minari, written and directed by Lee Isaac Chung, tells the semi-autobiographical story of Chung’s South Korean immigrant family as it tries to achieve the American dream in 1980’s Arkansas. The film, which stars Steven Yeun, Han Ye-ri, Youn Yuh-jung and Will Patton, has received six Oscar nominations, including for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, Best Actor (Yeun) and Best Supporting Actress (Youn).

Having survived the slog of cinema that was 2020, where even the very best films of the year like Mank, Nomadland and Judas and the Black Messiah are not great films, I held out hope for Minari to ride in on a white horse and save this year of cinema from death by a thousand mediocrities.

Unfortunately, Minari is not up to the task.

Minari is not a terrible movie, but it is not a very good one either. It suffers from many flaws, most notable being it doesn’t know what it is or what it wants to be and therefore ends up being a whole lot of nothing.

For example, in theory it has all the trappings of an arthouse movie but is so painfully conventional in execution it becomes devoid of interest and artistic credibility.

Minari is sort of like a working class Korean immigrant version of Marriage Story mixed with a culture clash/fish out of water/American Dream story, but it never successfully or even adequately tells any of those stories, preferring the approach of throwing everything into the stew yet creating no flavor.

A major flaw with the storytelling approach of Minari is that it has a generalized perspective, so there is no one particular protagonist to lead us through the story. Since Chung is writing auto-biographically, it would have been interesting to have his childhood perspective lead the way. But Chung seems incapable of the skill that would require, and therefore he halves the baby and spreads perspective around which saps the story of dramatic power.

Chung is also a rather unimaginative visual stylist, as Minari is a painfully flat film with sub-par framing and composition as well as a dull and stale color palette.

There are some interesting performances in the movie, most notably by Yeun and Will Patton of all people, but Chung’s lackluster direction is unable to contain these performances and therefore the drama dissipates even when the actors are running on all cylinders. Chung’s inability to break through the conventional leaves viewers detached and disinterested in the plight of these characters despite some skillful acting work.

Chung’s biggest failing though is as a writer, as he is incapable of trusting his audience with a pure arthouse experience and therefore sprinkles in narrative arcs and beats that are cookie-cutter conventionalities that fall dramatically flat. The contrast of this conventional story being wrapped in the deliberately paced trappings of an arthouse movie creates a frustrating movie decidedly at cross purposes with itself.

Ultimately, with the generalized perspective, the conventional narrative arcs and the tedious visual aesthetic, Minari feels like a bad tv drama more than a serious piece of cinema and Oscar contender.

As evidenced by the plethora of Oscar nominations and a stunning 98% critical score at Rotten Tomatoes, Minari is being lauded as a phenomenal film. But it seems to me that this is wishful thinking rather than accurate analysis of the film on screen.

In the wake of last year’s stirring success of Parasite, a spectacular piece of filmmaking by Korean director Bong Joon-ho, Minari has no doubt been given a boost among the critical elite in the hopes of bolstering “diversity and inclusion” and recreating Parasite’s stirring success.

In the flat earth society that is our culture, Parasite and Minari are in the same category despite having nothing in common except that they share the same language and ethnicity of director. This is absurd, but it is how our culture thinks and works, especially in the era of identity politics.

If Minari were the same story but centering around the struggles of some white family, critics would rightfully ignore it for the uninspired, middling movie that it is. The fact that mediocrities like Chung and Minari are nominated for Best Picture, Best Director and Best Screenplay speaks to how precipitous the decline in the art of cinema has become and to the hyper-delusional nature of a film business glorifying “diversity and inclusion” instead of talent, skill and craftsmanship.

In conclusion, there is absolutely nothing interesting or remarkable about Minari. It is an underwhelming and instantly forgettable film that is not deserving of any accolades or praise. If you want to see a mundane, middle-of-the-road movie, Minari is definitely for you.

©2021