By: Andrew Wing
Drive My Car (Japanese: ドライブ・マイ・カー, Hepburn: Doraibu mai kā) is a 2021 Japanese drama film co-written and directed by Ryusuke Hamaguchi. It is primarily based on Haruki Murakami’s short story of the same name from his 2014 collection Men Without Women while taking inspiration from other stories in it. The film follows Yūsuke Kafuku (played by Hidetoshi Nishijima) as he directs a multilingual production of Uncle Vanya in Hiroshima and grapples with the death of his wife, Oto.
Drive My Car had its world premiere at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival, where it competed for the Palme d’Or (lost to Titane - see full review) and won three awards, including Best Screenplay. The film received widespread critical acclaim, with many declaring it one of the best films of 2021. It earned four nominations at the 94th Academy Awards: Best Picture, Best Director, Best International Feature Film, and Best Adapted Screenplay. It is the first Japanese film nominated for Best Picture. Also, at the 79th Golden Globe Awards, the film won Best Foreign Language Film.
THE GOOD
I know I have brought it up in some of my past reviews, but I think Bong Joon-ho’s 2019 film Parasite is one of the best movies ever made. It is one of my all-time favorites and I truly think it’s a perfect film. In 2020, Parasite won Best Picture at the 92nd Academy Awards, becoming the first non-English language film to win the award. Parasite was the first foreign film I ever watched, and it really sparked my interest in film, but also a deeper appreciation for foreign films. With all that said, it’s only fitting that I review Drive My Car, a film that has been surging the past few months that’s also trying to become the second non-English language film to win the Best Picture after getting nominated in the category back on February 8, 2022. I literally started jumping up and down when I saw that it was coming to HBO Max in March, and I wasted no time in checking it out. So without further ado, let’s dive into this review and find out if one of 2021’s most critically acclaimed and talked about films is actually worth all the hype it’s been getting!
First things first, I honestly loved everything about this movie! It’s a slow burn type of movie that is this sort of epic mysterious drama with a ton of layers to unpack. It is a whopping three hours long, and although the three hours is a pretty substantial investment of time to give to a film, I felt like the attention given to it paid off greatly in the end. It certainly felt like a three-hour-long movie with it being a slow-burning drama, but I never felt like it was dragging at any moment as it kept finding new conflicts to explore and new characters to dive into. It never felt stagnant, as it was just always developing, and it never stopped evolving from start to finish.
So as I said in the introduction, the film got nominated for four Academy Awards, with one being Best Adapted Screenplay. I also mentioned in the intro my love for foreign films, and one of the best ones from the past five years is hands down the 2018 South Korean film Burning. I only bring this up because it turns out that Drive My Car is adapted from a short story from the writer of the short story that Burning was adapted off of, so I thought that was a cool tidbit of information. Anyways though, this screenplay is masterful. To put the plot vaguely so I don’t spoil anything, the film is about a stage actor and director who is putting together a play, but at the same time, he is grappling with the relationship he has with his wife. In my opinion, the strongest element of this movie is without a doubt the writing and watching this honestly felt like reading a good novel that you didn’t want to put down with how dense the film is. I’d be surprised to see it win the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay because of the other stronger contenders, but I sure am glad it received a nomination because it was more than deserving!
Another award the film got nominated for was Best Director for Ryusuke Hamaguchi. It was so evident from the very beginning that Hamaguchi as a director wasn’t worried about having a shorter runtime, but rather truly serving the script. It’s obviously a very dialogue heavy film, and while some might not say that that requires a lot of “direction” so to speak, I would disagree. I would because with this movie ultimately being about the way people communicate and perform, I think Hamaguchi was brilliant by having the film be a medium to showcase that. Aside from that though, there were other things I loved about his direction. One being how he chose to hold on certain shots where characters are delivering monologues. I appreciated it because it allowed what was happening to kind of burn in our brains as we watched. Also, the slow-burn atmosphere the movie develops as it continues works really well for it because it is an extremely thoughtful movie that demands that we think about it. The pacing too allows us to never feel lost in it as we constantly get that little bit of space we need to try and digest and think about what’s happening.
All the characters in Drive My Car are mysterious human beings that communicate intimate things about themselves in indirect ways. The film recognizes human beings as having trouble communicating directly with each other, and all of this was made possible and put on the forefront thanks to the performances we got. The main performance that is worthy of praise is Hidetoshi Nishijima as he plays the main character, Yūsuke Kafuku. He was simply incredible in this film, and it was one of my favorite performances of the year for sure. The range of emotions he puts on display throughout the film is fascinating and it all culminates at the very end of the film when he shows how broken his character is deep down. He also does this thing while riding in his car where he recites his own lines for his play from an audiotape, and it went to show how bought into his character he was. All in all, I loved him and it was a gut-wrenching performance that I will never forget.
In conclusion, Drive My Car is a profound and beautiful movie, but it is also an extremely thought-provoking film, and there was a lot that I took away from it. It is ultimately a drama about art and grief that will resonate with you for a long time as it shows us that if we want to better understand people, all we have to do is really try to listen. Hamaguchi shows us as viewers that somebody being there to listen to someone has an incredible power that we often forget. The film was certainly a moving one and I cannot wait to tune into the Oscars on Sunday, March 27th, and watch it do well at the awards as it will most definitely be winning the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.
THE BAD
If you can’t tell yet, I loved Drive My Car and have it easily as one of the best films of 2021. However, this movie definitely is not for everybody. It is one of those movies where the most that somebody will get out of it will come from analyzing it and picking it apart and then attempting to figure out what it’s trying to say underneath the surface. So with that said, if you’re someone who doesn’t really find yourself enjoying that analysis part of a movie, you are not going to be into this at all.
Also, as I mentioned earlier, this film is basically three hours long, coming in at a runtime of 179 minutes. That is a lot. The movie surely registers a little bit more like a text with all the dialogue and the written word more than it does as this cinematic experience you’d get from a film like The Batman (see Ted’s full review here). I’m not saying that Drive My Car isn’t a cinematic experience because it certainly was for me, but it’s just very reliant on one aspect of that as opposed to many. And lastly, it is a foreign film spoken entirely in Japanese, so if you don’t rock with subtitles then you are going to have to pass on this one, unfortunately.
THE VERDICT
Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car is an epic slow-burning drama that is one of the best films 2021 has to offer. The season’s most unlikely Oscar smash that has just about already locked up the Best Foreign Language Film award is the very definition of thought-provoking cinema, as it offers so many insightful ideas about human psychology. Also loved the lead performance by Hidetoshi Nishijima and the screenplay is a masterpiece.
Its 3-hour runtime is no joke and it is definitely a movie for critics rather than most general audiences, but nevertheless, it is a movie very ripe for repeat viewings so I can try and get a better grasp on it and hopefully take more away from it.
TED TAKES RATING - 9.8/10
Drive My Car is now available to watch on HBO Max. Check out the latest trailer below.