Directing: B+
Acting: B+
Writing: B+
Cinematography: B
Editing: B-

I’m going to be an outlier with this one. Not to say that Drive My Car is bad per se, while seemingly every other critic in the world regards it as a masterpiece—but, to say that this movie is fine. It’s not bad by any stretch, and I fully recognize that I may be missing what makes it a supposed masterwork. Maybe I don’t have the education needed to appreciate it fully. But if that’s the case, of what use is that to what few readers I have here?

There’s a lot to say about Drive My Car, to be sure, starting with the fact that over on MetaCritic.com, this movie is the sixth-best-reviewed movie of 2021, the second-best of the fall releases, and I kind of don’t get it. I could go and read some of those reviews to get a sense of what I may have missed and realize the movie is greater than I thought it was, but I’ll do that once I finish writing this. I don’t want my takes here to fall under their influence, lest my reaction become less genuine. And, to be fair, although MetaCritic has far more reliable metrics than Rotten Tomatoes, that site still faces legitimate criticisms: the 1-100 point scale given to each review that then is averaged is subjective to the scorer; it’s better just to find the few critics with a sensibility that speaks to you and seek out their reviews. (I will say this: most of my favorite sources for movie reviews loved it.)

What I keep thinking about is what the people I know would think about this movie. How many people in my life would have the patience, time, or bandwidth to sit through a three-hour, subtitled Japanese film that is incredibly quiet and measured, features largely deadpan deliveries, and features an incredible amount of stage-performed dialogue from Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya? I can think of maybe one. Okay, two: another friend did see the movie with me, after all. And when we left the theater and I said there was no need for it to be nearly that long, she emphatically agreed with me.

I will admit, the only reason I saw this movie at all was because the critical consensus was so shockingly high. And, I can even see how that happened. But, that also makes it a cliché: the independent or international feature that critics go apeshit for but audiences largely regard with indifference. There was a pretty good number of people at the showing I went to yesterday, especially for one as early as 4:30 and in the middle on an ongoing pandemic (not to mention at the start of a ramp-up to an unprecedented surge of infections, although a lot of people still haven’t quite registered that), but it was also in a theater known for showing these kinds of films, owned by SIFF, in a city of movie lovers.

I can’t even describe the story that makes it sound exciting, or worthy of such massive critical praise. Stage director Kafuku (Hidetoshi Nishijima), grieving the sudden death of his actor-turned-screenwriter wife Oto (Reika Kirishima), lands a residency job at a Hiroshima theater directing Uncle Vanya. For insurance purposes, the theater company gives him no choice but to allow them to hire him a driver for his car, a quiet young woman named Misaki (Tôko Miura). The story is ostensibly about the developing relationship—always platonic and vaguely paternal, never romantic, which is a relief—between Kafuku and his driver Misaki. But also figuring into the story prominently is the very young and hot actor Kafuku hires to be his Vanya, Kôji Takatsuki (Masaki Okada), who may or may not have been having an affair with Oto before she died. And, to a lesser extent, a few of the other cast members of the play, particularly the Korean man who helps cast and produce it, as well as the mute Korean woman cast in the play even though she communicates via Korean sign language.

There’s a kind of intersectionality at play in Drive My Car, which I found at times fascinating and at times mystifying. What does “diversity” mean from such a wildly different vantage point from my own—from Japan, for instance? There are no queer characters here (at least not identified; I did wonder somewhat about Misaki), and they are all Asian. But, there is a truly unusual degree of multilingual representation, from the casting of a woman who speaks Korean Sign Language, to a common stage design element featuring about five different languages of subtitles on a huge screen behind the stage. I found myself a little jealous of that: I want to see a play with subtitles! Furthermore, Kafuku speaks only Japanese and English, yet he casts actors who speak other languages but neither of his. This is never presented as a challenge in the casting of his play, and he even happily casts someone who doesn’t speak Japanese, even though the scripts they are reading are translated from its original Russian to Japanese. How does that work? The movie doesn’t bother to get into it.

And god knows, it had the time. When I say we see a lot of line readings of Uncle Vanya, whether in rehearsal or in actual stage performances, I mean a lot. If you combined that with the amount of time we spend with Kafuku practicing lines from a recorded cassette of Oto reading the rest of the dialogue, while in the car as Misaki drives him, and then cut out all that Uncle Vanya content, this movie would be at least half an hour shorter. Maybe more.

It seems clear there is great meaning to this movie’s plot, among the content of those Uncle Vanya lines, some kind of direct emotional corollary that I just couldn’t register. Maybe I could if I had ever studied or even read Uncle Vanya, but I have not. And how much crossover is there in that Venn diagram, really, of people both audiences of Uncle Vanya and people intimately familiar with the Chekhov text?

To be fair, Drive My Car is still skillfully plotted. The story is really about Kafuku and Misaki quite gradually discovering themselves to be kindred spirits; it must be about a third of the way through the movie before Misaki even appears. Director Ryûsuke Hamaguchi likes to take his time to occasionally baffling degree: the opening credits occur fully forty minutes into the film, so far into it that it took me several moments to realize they were opening credits, as I was confused as to what the names onscreen were supposed to mean. Before that moment, though, we spend plenty of time getting a sense of Kafuku’s marriage, the nature of their relationship, and even their sex life, a part of which is both how the film opens and ultimately becomes a pivotal plot point.

Which is to say, Drive My Car has plenty to recommend it, and I don’t consider it to have been a waste of time. That said, what it does have to recommend it just takes so much time to come along, I’m hard pressed to imagine many people prioritizing it over the countless other entrainment options they have. This movie is “a ride” only in the literal sense, but its effect is a lot more like an extended, leisurely stroll. Even the performances are curious, in that the delivery is so stiff and deadpan most of the time, with the notable exception of when we see the actors performing their scenes from Uncle Vanya. Only then do we see them become in any way animated. otherwise, people stand still, hands at their sides. Even in the emotionally climactic scene between Kafuku and Misaki, as Kafuku breaks down, Hidetoshi Nishijima emotes plenty in his performance, but he’s still otherwise standing perfectly still.

Thus, there is something simultaneously emotionally raw, and emotionally detached, about Drive My Car. It’s technically dense with nuance, when it comes to plotting and story construction, but it rarely even employs the use of a score. That’s not to say we need to be emotionally manipulated here, but something about the performances feels detached from the reality of everyday human living. Perhaps something is getting lost in translation, culturally, from Japan to my local theater. Or maybe it’s just me. Plenty of American critics were clearly deeply moved by this movie, but I found it a sort of fascinating curiosity at best. There’s even a brief coda at the very end, revisiting Misaki at a later time, and it plops us, without any context whatsoever, right into the middle of the pandemic: she’s shopping at a grocery store, everyone is wearing face masks. This movie has nothing to say about COVID, though; it just brings us into the apparently current day at the end. Clearly the production up to that point had been prior to the pandemic.

And now I have reached a truly unusual 1500 words in this very review, offering an overlong take on an overlong movie. In my defense, spending several minutes reading this review might be more efficient than three hours watching the movie. Drive My Car does offer rewards to those with patience, and I consider myself among that group. My struggle here is not knowing how many such people are out there.

*You might feel like this about halfway through the movie.*

Overall: B