Review: 'Drive My Car' is a beautifully moving story of love, grief, and the creative process

There are moments during the three-hour run of Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s “Drive My Car” — like when the credits start, and it becomes clear the first 40 minutes was a prologue — that a viewer may wonder what they’ve gotten themselves into.

Bear with it, though, and the richness and devastating emotional impact of this breathtakingly human story — about love and grief and guilt and art — becomes apparent.

In that prologue, Hamaguchi introduces Yûsuke Kabuki (Hidetoshi Nishijima), a Tokyo theater director, and his wife, Oto (Reika Kirishima), a writer for television. It’s shown early that Oto gets inspiration for her scripts after having sex with Yûsuke, and it’s later shown that Oto also is having an affair with Kôji Takatsuki (Mask Okada), an actor in one of her TV productions. Before Yûsuke and Oto can talk about this, Oto collapses and suddenly dies. That’s the prologue.

Fast-forward two years, and Yûsuke has gone to Hiroshima to direct an international cast in a production of Anton Chekhov’s classic “Uncle Vanya.” The theater company surprises Yûsuke by presenting him with a driver — a quiet young woman, Misaki Watari (Tôko Miura) — for the duration of the production. This disrupts Yûsuke’s process, which involved listening to cassettes recorded by Oto reading dialogue from the play he’s working on, but he accepts Misaki’s role as chauffeur.

Meanwhile, as auditions begin, Yûsuke gets another surprise: One of the actors trying out for the play is Kôji, the man who was sleeping with Oto.

(Side note: This isn’t part of the plot, but it’s just fascinating that Yûsuke’s production is performed in several languages at once, with actors speaking Japanese, Mandarin, Korean and even in Korean sign language — all together on the same stage, with supertitles in several languages projected above the proscenium.) 

Of course, “Uncle Vanya” is a considered choice for Hamaguchi, who teamed with Takamasa Oe to adapt the story from a Haruki Murakami short story. “Vanya” is a story of love and loss, and it expresses the emotions that Yûsuke cannot about his complicated feelings for his wife. It’s also a tricky play to stage, and Hamaguchi’s stage adaptation captures that beautifully — notably in the final passages, as an actress, Lee Yoon-a (Yoo-rim Park, the movie’s stealth MVP), portraying the kind-hearted Sonya, delivers the closing soliloquy silently through Korean sign language.

Not all of the film’s revelations take place on the stage. There are some tender moments, and one shatteringly emotional one, between Yûsuke and his driver, Tôko, when she finally reveals how she got to Hiroshima.

So “Drive My Car” is great — but is it three-hours great? That’s a decision left for each viewer. But I’ll tell you this: For three hours, I was raptly paying attention, unable to guess where Hamaguchi was taking us next. 

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‘Drive My Car’

★★★★

Opens Friday, January 7, at Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Not rated, but probably R for sexuality, nudity, some violence, and language. Running time: 179 minutes; mostly in Japanese, and other languages, with subtitles.