Drive, She Said
Drive, She Said
| 08 September 1997 (USA)
Drive, She Said Trailers

Nadine, a late 20's small town bank teller is stuck. Stuck at a job that's comfortable, but not very challenging. Stuck in a relationship of five years that's comfortable, but not very passionate. Stuck on the traditional path towards adulthood. But when Nadine is taken hostage in a dramatic bank heist gone wrong, her ordered life explodes in confusion.

Reviews
RipDelight This is a tender, generous movie that likes its characters and presents them as real people, full of flaws and strengths.
ChicDragon It's a mild crowd pleaser for people who are exhausted by blockbusters.
TaryBiggBall It was OK. I don't see why everyone loves it so much. It wasn't very smart or deep or well-directed.
Roman Sampson One of the most extraordinary films you will see this year. Take that as you want.
roger-212 I thought this was a very nice meditation on genre, gender, and a very professionally shot "indie" film about a woman who is finding her her own identity - and what she's capable of.All wrapped up in a bank-robber/on-the-run-from-the-law story, the guy isn't very interesting; it's all about the woman (Moira Kelly). Sure she falls in love with him...or maybe the idea of being in love and on the run. A smart script, nice elliptical thematic touches to keep things moving on a more "conceptual" level.The other comments that note there is no "plot" miss the point. It's about her "movement" - through space, down the road, and into a state of understanding.I hope this person makes more movies.
Tito-8 I don't want to waste too much time with this comment, basically because I don't have many good things to say about this movie. The first twenty minutes or so are mildly entertaining, but then, it simply falls apart. The comedic bits aren't funny, I was indifferent to the dramatic moments, and there was nothing to like about these dull characters (especially the leads). In fact, even though I saw this movie a mere five days ago, I've already forgotten how the film ended. Need I say more?
enfilmigult Though the script has indeed been done to death already, it's not the script itself so much as the wonderful filter it's put through that makes this worth seeing. The basic outline of the plot is embarrassing just to summarize--a woman is forced to choose between security with her boring bank teller fiancée, and heady but dangerous freedom with the good-looking bank robber who kidnaps her. Seriously. It's clichéd to its very bones, in every detail, at pretty much every moment.It's kind of amazing that the writer/director of 'Double Happiness' would invest any time or effort in this idea, but give her credit: she really invested time and effort in it. I've been trying to nail down what it is she's doing here, and it's difficult. She tells this story with utter sincerity, but never seems to be pretending that it's anything but absurd. There's no way we would ever buy this setup, so why not make it all look like some sort of fluid, color-saturated dream? There's barely a plot to hang together, so why not just sort of slide through it in a happy, dreamy reverie? And yet the characters are written and performed exactly like people who've never seen a movie in which anything like this ever happened, and are so surprised by each development that they nearly trick us into being surprised ourselves. Search me as to why this is so watchable.In short, 'Drive, She Said' could have been a boring, listless road movie with a scanty story, and instead it's a dreamlike, beautiful road movie with a scanty story. More profound insights can be had from a movie, without a doubt, but it's hard to begrudge one that's so clearly happy to be alive.
allyjack A beautiful, art-deco-ish opening credit sequence, set to beguiling bossa-nova flavored music, seems to promise something unusually quirky and allusive. For ten or fifteen minutes that still seems possible, before the movie - through a lame kidnapper-hostage love story - descends into astonishing predictability, and takes on a kind of joyless, sombre melancholy. The very short running time seems like a simple surrender, and falls far short of the feminine self-validation that's apparently intended. The saddest thing is that even if the movie had achieved what seem to be its goals, you'd still shrug at it.