WHY DRIVE DID DESERVE AN ADAPTED SCREENPLAY NOMINATION

WHY DRIVE DID DESERVE AN ADAPTED SCREENPLAY NOMINATION

One of the most glaring omissions of this year's awards season including all the precursors is the lack of love for the ambitious screenplay of Drive which just so happens to be my favorite film of the year. Upon further inspection, it can be noticed the the movie itself has received a lot of attention at the precursors especially for its directing and Albert Brooks. Now the best adapted screenplay lineup this year is very strong but it was quite puzzling to me as to why Drive's script got no attention whatsoever.

Now, it is not entirely impossible to see why Hossen Amini's script got no love. Some people thought that the movie was more of a director's piece than a writer's. Others thought that the movie had too little dialogue to warrant any recognition for the movie's dense screenplay and then there are others who simply did not like the movie to begin with. It can't be denied that one would require a little bit of patience for the movie to truly work for them. But alas, I still think the script is indeed one of the years best and I have compiled a list of reasons for why I think it should have been a nominee in this year's adapted screenplay category.


1. The Movie works because of the lack of dialogue


What's frustrating is that in today's moviegoing audience is that they can never appreciate uniqueness. Every single film must follow a basic formula in order to appeal to the masses and "make sense" for the average moviegoer. The dialogue is used to make the movie easier to follow and can often used jarringly in scenes of exposition. Unless done with the total immersion of the audience e.g.Inception,  it is a complete cop out for making the plot easy to follow.

To me, the lack of dialogue in Drive makes the movie extra special as it in turn utilises the art of telling its story, developing the characters,  their feelings and creating atmosphere all through visual storytelling. Telling the story through the characters actions or words is an artform that only few have been able to master. Take James Cameroon for instance. In his film Aliens, he manages to show the ferocious nature and passion of the character Ripley all through her expressions and her actions in the film. Likewise, in Drive we have the character of Driver, a mysterious introvert who seems to be borderline psychotic. The script does a miraculas job of setting up the character and making the audience root for him and yet he barely has any lines. Its also worth mentioning that the characters name isn't even provided. By the end of the film, he is stuck in our minds for days to come.

2. The movie has practically no exposition

This is a common problem for most of these kinds of movies. The entire first act is spent trying to explain how the characters operate and we may get to see a 5-10 minute action scene or montage showing the character in action. While this can work sometimes, it would have certainly been a very lazy and dare I say tempting move for Amini to add to Drive's script.

But in the end, the only thing close to exposition we saw in the film was the intense opening of the film where we got to see how the driver operates. His function as a driver is explained in the first minute and     his skills as a driver are shown in the first 10 minutes. This is how a film should operate, after that one scene alone, we already knew what this character was capable of and it instantly grabbed the audiences attention.

3. Its simplicity


To me, the blame for all the "arthousey" moments in Drive is taken by director Nicolas Winding Refn. It was his "dream-like"scenery that made the film so existential. however, the script must also be taken into account for its simplicity.

The relatively simple story of Drive really helped to compliment Winding Refn's style of the film. The simplicity opened many doors as to how the story could be told. A common problem with most contemporary scripts is that they do not give the director the freedom to execute the film with their vision/approach, while this can sometimes be a good thing. Think Charlie Kaufman, it may also be potentially damaging to the movie if the writer gets too self indulgent with his material. 

Fortunately for Drive, the script was completely selfless, it only cared about the characters and moving the story forward. It left the interpretation of the story all to the director. A damn good director at that.

Well that's about it folks,  hope you agree with me on this and I would love to hear what you think!