Here comes my shocking cinematic admission that lowers my standing with my critical brethren: I don’t see what the big fuss is with Drive My Car. The three-hour Japanese movie has bewitched most critics, won several Best Film of the Year designations, and was nominated for four Oscars including Best Picture, something only ten or so films have achieved in the Academy’s history. It’s a guaranteed winner for Best International Film, something only one other Japanese film has earned, and no, not anything from legendary Akira Kurosawa. All this is a protracted way of saying this is a very well regarded movie across the globe… and I just couldn’t get into it. Part of this is that the length is overly indulgent and meandering. The three hours feel far too leisurely, and structurally, the entire opening 45 minutes could have been cut and begun with our grieving actor/theater professional restarting his life two years after the sudden death of his wife. Everything you would need to know in that pre-credit beginning is covered later in the movie, which made me wonder why not leave some of the elements as mysteries to be filled in later such as the character’s complicated relationship to his unfaithful wife, what he knew or didn’t know, who is the voice on the tape he’s listening to running lines for the Chekov play Uncle Vanya in his car, and his personal connection to the leading man in the play he’s directing. A whole hour of this movie might be listening to actors say lines from Uncle Vanya, or just hear lines from Uncle Vanya, and then applying the 1898 Russian play to these modern characters and their lives. It’s clever but this kind of stuff works better as subtext. With Drive My Car, it’s the text, the literal text of the story for long portions, and that comes across as frustrating because it’s setting up characters, having them read a famous play, and then telling the audience, “Well, you find the connections.” Again, this works as layered subtext and metaphor in addition to a compelling story, but so much of Drive My Car is at this level of artistic interpretation. Did we need a dozen subdued scenes of them practicing the play in order for the ending to have its impact? That’s the power of art, a tool we can use to relate our fears, hopes, and identities with, sympathizing with the struggles and triumphs of people from other times and places. The core of this movie, for me, was the relationship between the main character and his younger driver assigned to him by the university. This character unfortunately doesn’t get her due until much later. Drive My Car has some beautiful moments, like a graceful family dinner, like the trip to the garbage site in Hiroshima, like a backseat monologue about, what else, decoding a story for meaning as it applies to character insight. This isn’t a bad movie. I can certainly appreciate the big swings at big ideas about grief, the human condition, and the reflective power of art. It’s just structured in a way that doesn’t allow those core elements to shine. Eliminate  many scenes of play rehearsals, eliminate many scenes of driving, and even eliminate the opening 45 minutes, and you have a better paced, better emphasized human drama, at least to my mind. There are plenty of people who have fallen in love with all three hours, but I found myself more listless than lovelorn. I really wanted to like Drive My Car better but I found too much of it to be meandering, redundant, and frustratingly cold and opaque. In the end, after three dragging hours, I could at least say, yes, that woman certainly did drive that man’s car.

Nate’s Grade: B-