2022 Best Picture Review: Drive My Car
Yūsuke (Hidetoshi Nishijima) speaks with his driver Misaki (Tōko Miura, right) as they discuss life in Hiroshima. Drive My Car is nominated for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best International Feature at the 94th Academy Awards.
In this Best Picture review, Tom tackles the three-hour Ryusuke Hamaguchi opus, Drive My Car. Drive My Car is the eighth film to be nominated for both Best Picture and Best International Feature (or, formerly, Best Foreign Language Film). It stars Hidetoshi Nishijima as a widower trying to come to terms with his place in life and his complex relationship with his late wife. It is currently available to stream on HBO Max.
“But even if you think you know someone well, even if you love that person deeply, you can’t completely look into that person’s heart . . . . If you really want to look at someone, then your only option is to look at yourself squarely and deeply.”
If you saw the list of Best Picture nominees and were like, “what the hell is Drive My Car?,” you surely weren’t alone. The meditative 179-minute Japanese character epic netted only $5.1 million at the international box office, surely one of the lowest non-streaming-related box office numbers of any Best Picture nominee in history. And it’s easy to understand why: as I mentioned, it’s about three hours long and it’s mostly about a man trying to cope with the death of his wife by producing a stage adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya and becoming friends with his driver. I can’t imagine there’s a massive audience for something like this. Yet here it is, Drive My Car, the first Japanese Best Picture nominee in the history of the Academy Awards and only the ninth film to garner nominations for both the Best Picture category and the Best International Feature category (or their historical equivalents).
And hey, that’s exactly why we started watching all the Best Picture nominees almost a decade ago! We may not agree with the nominees every single year (looking at you, Joker), but we’ve been introduced to so many good movies we otherwise never would have seen, and Drive My Car is no exception. This movie was emotional and powerful and deeply complex, and I likely would never have watched it. That would have been a shame!
Directed by Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Drive My Car is loosely based on a short story of the same name from the collection Men Without Women by the acclaimed author Haruki Murakami (Norwegian Wood, 1Q84). Without going into too much detail about the circumstances, the film follows Yusuke Kafuku (Hidetoshi Nishijima) as he navigates grief and survivor’s guilt after his wife Oto (Reika Kirishima), a screenwriter, suddenly passes away. Their relationship is more complicated than at first glance, and her death only complicates it further. Along the way, he somewhat begrudgingly engages in enlightening conversations with his driver Masaki (Tōko Miura) and the young leading man in his play and former colleague of Oto, Kōji (Masaki Okada). That’s really all there is to it. It unravels its bits and pieces slowly and it takes patience - and it’s definitely not a barn burner - but if you stick with it, it’s a striking, beautiful, affecting film.
Despite the strengths of the writing, it’s Nishijima who carries the runtime. He appears in nearly every scene and it’s through his nuanced performance that the film (to me, at least) doesn’t drag along like another three-hour movie might (@TheIrishman). Playing a man who is trying to bury his obvious grief, his acting (especially nonverbally) displays his pain as the viewer roots for him to make a breakthrough. Discussing his process with the Los Angeles Times, Nishijima spoke of the subtle work he put in:
“Part of that is deep preparation,” the actor said recently, speaking through a translator. “You also have to trust that the camera and audience will detect these emotions based on a slight change of expression or a gaze in a different direction.”
It’s this type of trust and communication through the screen that pushes a film like Drive My Car to the next level. When there’s a film like this that’s about grief, bottling up feelings, and trying to put on a brave face to pretend that everything is okay—like all of us have done at some point or will do in the future—it takes a lot of nuance to convey that onscreen.
The grief depicted in Drive My Car is intense and all-consuming: as Nishijima stated, “for Hamaguchi, the director, he saw the original stories [in Murakami’s Men Without Women] as a question he was trying to answer with this film: how people who are separated in the world overcome these difficulties. This hardship is something you have to face, but it’s aided by the communication between the characters. It’s the only way that they can save each other.”
Grief is a universal emotion that is often stigmatized as weakness. People who need therapy don’t get it (including ALL of the characters in this movie). But even in these situations, grief sometimes squeezes itself out in other ways: for example, Yusuke’s multilingual production of the play Uncle Vanya by Anton Chekhov. The production consists of actors who speak English, Chinese, Tagalog, Japanese, and Korean Sign Language. How does this tie in with the theme of complicated grief? Well, for starters, Yusuke is stuck in a cycle of regret for not communicating with Oto while she was alive. Their signals get crossed in a major way and it is one of the drivers of Yusuke’s torment throughout the film. More literally though, as Nina Li Coomes of The Atlantic observed:
[T]he task [Yusuke] lays out for his multilingual cast is the same one that Hamaguchi lays out for his multilingual audience: Even if you don’t understand all the words being spoken in the script, trust that the emotional response you have will be genuine.
(As a side note, I highly recommend reading Coomes’ Atlantic piece I linked above if you’ve seen the film. It’s a truly beautiful analysis of how Hamaguchi uses language and communication in the movie).
If Coomes’ analysis is correct, then Drive My Car delivered on its goal to evoke a genuine emotional response from me. There are at least three critical scenes that I still run through in my head, a couple of weeks after having seen the film: one is a shot of Yusuke and Misaki, reaching a sort of breakthrough, holding their cigarettes out of the sunroof of the blocky red Saab where much of the movie takes place, the freest either of them has felt in a long time. Another is a scene in the car where Yusuke and Kōji bond over their connections with Oto as they begin to understand one another and their parallels become clearer. And finally, the emotional climax of the film, which takes place in quiet, serene snow near Misaki’s childhood home. Despite the bustle of Hiroshima, it’s in the confines of the Saab and in the remoteness of wooded areas of Hokkaido where people are most themselves. And I think that’s a universal feeling—we’re most like ourselves and most self-aware of who we really are when we’re alone or with people we trust, and our true selves and deepest feelings only come out gradually.
As Hamaguchi told BBC, this is why it was vital for the car to be a medium for communication in the film as well:
"The car is a space where you don't have to look at each other, and it's a situation when you can create a relationship that wouldn't be possible outside of the car. And you don't get to be judgmental about the other person within this kind of space. You can express your feelings and emotions in an honest way. You can be close to the other person and it can be intimate. And if you don't speak or express yourself, it could actually be awkward."
And I think this is totally right. I’ve had some of the best conversations in my life while driving or while being a passenger in someone’s car, and I’ve made many close lifelong friends this way. I still prefer to carpool whenever possible for this very reason: I like being able to talk with my friends with minimal distractions, even if it’s just small talk. There is also some degree of self-consciousness and defensiveness, as Hamaguchi notes, in having a sort of excuse not to visually focus on someone as you’re talking. For me at least, it allows me to isolate the message of what the other person is saying and it lets me say what I want to say without trying to simultaneously read the person’s reaction, which sometimes makes me adjust what I’m really feeling into something more palatable to what I think the other person wants to hear. It’s a whole lot of overthinking for just simply “talking to my friends,” but I think that when you really break it down like Hamaguchi does, it’s something that is ubiquitous and applies to most people to a certain degree, especially for people that have some degree of social anxiety like I do.
That’s what the film tries to get across. Intimacy and graduality are the name of the game here—though the short story clocks in at a swift 40 pages, Hamaguchi’s film is almost exactly three hours long and is virtually entirely focused on four characters. But I promise you, if you go into it with an open mind looking to learn, every square inch of this film is packed with poignancy and humanity. It speaks to you. The way you connect with the characters, you want to see them make that breakthrough, and you want to see them at least begin the upward curve of acceptance.
Hamaguchi succinctly describes the message of the film, tragic but hopeful and aware:
"You've got to love … others and at one time, you will lose them. And it's absolutely universal. It's a very strong message from Murakami. He depicts the narrative in great detail. And I wanted to do that in the film context and I think I was successful to a certain degree."
When I watched Drive My Car, I liked it a lot. But the more I’ve sat with it and read about it and thought about some of the scenes and how the themes were conveyed by Hamaguchi, the more I realize that it might have been my favorite movie of this cycle. I actually ordered Murakami’s Men Without Women collection and Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya because of how much this movie connected with me. If this review makes even one more person watch Drive My Car, that would make me happy (and I’d love to talk about it with you!). I was ready to give it a solid 8.5 or 9 out of 10, but after writing this all up, I’ve changed my mind.
Rating: 9.5/10