"Drive My Car" Breaks Down On the Highway to Meaning

It throws the kitchen sink, but like any mess, Drive My Car lacks substance.

March 17, 2022

On December 7, 1941, the Empire of Japan launched a surprise attack on the United States naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. The world had been at war for two years since Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany invaded Poland, but the US had remained neutral in the conflict.

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Japan had just brought them into it.

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The resulting years of conflict sent American troops to the far reaches of the Pacific in a bloody theater that left 6.5 million soldiers dead. The bloodshed only concluded when the Japanese Minister of Foreign Affairs Mamoru Shigemitsu signed the Japanese Instrument of Surrender aboard the USS Missouri on September 2, 1945, nearly four years after Pearl Harbor.

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Two weeks earlier, Emperor Hirohito delivered a broadcast to his people confirming the surrender:

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“Should we continue to fight, it would not only result in an ultimate collapse and obliteration of the Japanese nation, but also it would lead to the total extinction of human civilization.”

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The world got brought to the brink by a general human corruption whose specific application was so barbaric it defies belief to this day. Imagining its continued presence in global affairs would have led to that “total extinction” is certainly not a stretch. The United States dropped two atomic bombs, one on the city of Hiroshima, the other on Nagasaki, in August 1945: 250,000 people died directly from those bombings.

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It was not our place to dole out moral sovereignty on nuanced notions of human principle, especially considering our partial motives: the people most easily blamed for our suffering were going to get blamed. Japan struck first; we struck last. The idea of an eye for an eye hardly made the world go blind; the United States rose to be one of the world’s two superpowers, the Empire of Japan folded two years later, and a generation of American citizens lived and died by a hatred for the Japanese.

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Foreign films afford many opportunities, chiefly an appreciation of cultural differences and how they funnel themselves into the world’s unifying creation: art. More importantly, they allow us to understand that human experiences are exactly that: human. Regardless of race, ethnicity, creed, sex, sexuality, gender, socioeconomic status, or political affiliation, the world makes puppets of us all.

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The question is, if a movie aims to be something, emerges as nothing close to that thing, but manages to accomplish something greater without earning all the praise it gets given, is it a good movie?

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Drive My Car is the story of Yūsuke Kafuku, an actor and theater director living with his wife, Oto, in Japan. She is a screenwriter whose creative impulse is active at the moment of climax, granting the couple a fulfilling sex life that celebrates their mutual passion for the arts. One day, after his flight gets canceled at the last minute, Yūsuke comes home to find Oto having sex with a younger man. He leaves and does not address the discovery with his wife. Later, Oto tells Yūsuke that she wishes to speak with him when he returns from work. Desperate to avoid the confrontation, he delays his return. When he walks in, he finds his wife dead.

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Two years later, he ventures to Hiroshima for a residency, hired to write and direct an adaptation of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya. Forced to abandon his daily ritual of driving himself around in his prized red Saab, stuck with a driver he neither asked for nor expected, he confronts the trials life has forced him to endure, gaining perspective on tragedy, reaping reward from the sowing of suffering, and resolving his life’s difficulties through the very medium he and his late wife bonded over: art.

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Drive My Car understands the realities from which we, and thus films, often flee. No amount of assurances, either pointed or verbose, can absolve us of responsibility for our choices. If we abandon our loved ones to ruin or delay their salvation to safeguard our illusions, the consequences are ours to shoulder. The root cause of our avoidance may stem from their iniquity, but we can never choose how others treat us, only our reactions.

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Misaki killed her mother just as Yūsuke killed his wife. In recognizing this, they become people whose emotional journey becomes more than just a barrage of tragedy from which they seek resolve. Looking away from guilt to embrace fact forces us to accept the inevitability of life. No one can drive to a destination that grants absolution; even in the end, on the snowy hills of Hokkaido, they embrace in that acceptance. Life spins on irrespective of what we desire most or can or cannot have. The dead will remain dead, the questions for which we cannot receive answers will surround us for eternity, and all we hold onto to move forward will be just as contrasted by our circumstances as supported. Unfortunately, Drive My Car cannot impart wisdom unto us. It disrespects its subject matter by imbuing every character with the profundity to unveil life’s philosophical mysteries. It also undermines its premise with a foundational error.

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Love is not complicated. It overflows with specifics related to how we perceive the world and ourselves, process our experiences, and apply the answers we give to tough questions. It is fueled by complexity, so much so that even the wisest and most introspective can never fully comprehend it; that does not make love itself “complicated.”

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Love is an emotion, but it is also something that we do. We make commitments and stand by them regardless of how difficult the unexpected makes honoring what once seemed easy to uphold. We give our word and hold true to it despite the urge to deviate from all we swore to embrace the allure of the unfamiliar. We look past what cannot change, help modify what can be changed, and cherish everything we hope forever remains the same.

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Disavowing the morality of love is to abandon it altogether. We cannot drag the people we claim to love into heartache, craft scenarios that distort the sense of reality we granted them, promise them something before ripping it all away and say we love them. Oto did not love Yūsuke, despite Misaki rationalizing her indiscretions.

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In a world where ethical non-monogamy is gaining traction, the concept of sexual side-steps not overriding love has become more socially recognized. Oto and Yūsuke should have been two people in an agreed-upon arrangement, where his love for her could not refuse her creative outlets and her love for him could not trap him into a false union. Ideological differences can affect compatibility, but rarely can they quell affection. As Yūsuke grapples with a taxing arrangement he does not care for on principle, his wife dies. The questions he asks about love, whether he ever had it, and what role his unwillingness to be true to himself played in his wife’s death, can never get answered by Oto, only by his journey.

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But by making Oto an adulterer, the movie falls apart thematically. It asserts that love can exist in the same house as non-monogamy without factoring in ethics. Oto can shower Yūsuke with affection, check in to ensure his flight landed safely, and share in their mutual love for creation. She can check off all the boxes and give the appearance of propriety; she can perform generous acts, like make recordings of herself reading Yūsuke’s plays to help him practice in the refuge of his Saab. Unfortunately, generosity, propriety, mutuality, affection, and curiosity are not love. Love is love. Love demands respect, honesty, and transparency: someone knowing the truth but keeping mum does not count. Yūsuke searches for something he can never find because the journey lacks a foundation.

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Drive My Car suffers in many ways. It is so bent on seeming profound, drawing its audience into overstretched monologues that melodramatically repeat the same sentiments over and over, that it forgets to speak. Movies can ask us questions without providing answers and succeed, but doing so requires that you prove an understanding of not only the question but the answers we will find as we file from the theater. Drive My Car wants to convince us it understands by employing tropes to feign depth it does not possess. Everyone has unlocked the secrets; everyone knows something the world keeps hidden; everyone feels the world the same way, computes it the same, and speaks on it the same. It wants so badly to grant every moment profundity that it forgets to say something you couldn’t find in a brooding Tumblr blog.

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We cannot ignore that Drive My Car does more for the cause of foreign films than most. It undoes the stereotypical image held by many American audiences, that of a fast-talking, noodle-slurping populace donning Hello Kitty backpacks and getting trampled by Godzilla. Japan’s skies are no less blue, its grass no less green, and its snow no less white than ours. Despite its many thematic faults, Yūsuke experiences a world lit like ours, and that familiarity helps us understand that themes are universal.

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The quiet lends it credence before you remember it can never go where it wants. It can allow the few truths it genuinely understands to resonate for the brief time the film allows. We can never genuinely know another person. We can be intuitive, but even the most sharp-eyed find their judgment clouded by sentiment. The gullible will get trapped, the naive will get fooled, the trusting will get deceived, and the selfless will get exploited. The best any of us can do is look inside ourselves, ask tough questions, accept hard truths, and let every realization inform us moving forward. Yūsuke feels assured of his wife's love based on his perceptions of her character. When Takatsuki shatters the veneer, stripping away the notion that somehow, despite her dalliances, what they had was distinct, his journey shifts from being one of slow realization to the acceptance that our truth is the only one we can ever know.

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If Drive My Car recognized just why this is from the beginning, it would have succeeded. It has moments of awareness where the story feels like it hits hard at something worth hearing. Unfortunately, it undoes itself by liberating its protagonist after challenging his perspective. Takatsuki is icy as he stares into Yūsuke’s soul, as though the knowledge he saw more deeply into Oto is some primal trump card. The reveal should stun Yūsuke into beginning a slow odyssey to acceptance, informed by the tragic backstory of his now closely-bonded driver. Everything she knows of stored resentment, the need for escape, and reconciling what we "know" for ourselves with what life tells us is true, means nothing because Yūsuke is fundamentally unprepared to accept it. Takatsuki assures him his wife was more to him than their immoral fumblings could have meant. With this reassurance, the movie robs itself of autonomy. The thematics use Misaki as an audible, hoping to disguise a three-hour mistake by turning a dead-eyed near-mute into a narrative anchor. Unlike the love Oto should have borne Yūsuke, it is transparent.

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It can parallel its central figure’s stage play with the questions his life’s course thrusts upon him. It can meander with endless conclusions, stretching itself over ponderous epilogues loaded with musing. It can pack its emotional heights into the tight confines of a red Saab, soothing the peaks with valleys of exposition. It can contrast the stage roles with the course life takes before blurring the line between them to resolve its ideals. It can be everything cinephiles declare the outside world incapable of understanding so they can believe they grasp something lesser minds cannot. In the end, Drive My Car stalls in that airport parking lot. It’s out of gas, someone cut the brake lines, the windshield is cracked, someone side-swiped the driver-side mirror, and an ex keyed the passenger side. We can thank it for breaking down barriers and undoing stereotypes, granting its characters humanity that seemed impossible to us 80 years ago as President Roosevelt branded December 7, 1941, a “day which will live in infamy.” Sadly, we can do no more than that, except acknowledge a disappointing truth: you can ride as many miles as you wish; if the car itself is flawed, the ride will always be bumpy.