Driven (2001)

Driven arrives from 2001, a year when the cultural weather had not yet turned. Renny Harlin's CART racing picture concerns a rookie named Jimmy Bly, his faltering focus, and a grizzled former champion named Joe Tanto, played by Sylvester Stallone, who also wrote and produced the thing. On the representation front, the paddock is a white room with a single exception: Cristián de la Fuente as Memo Moreno, whose heritage the screenplay never acknowledges. He is simply a teammate. There is no LGBTQ presence to speak of, no subtext, no gesture in that direction. The women exist to be won, lost, and won again. Estella Warren's Sophia is a prize passed between two drivers, and Gina Gershon's Cathy exists to goad her husband into a crash that reshapes the championship.

The environmental dimension is not merely absent here but inverted. This is a film that treats the combustion of fossil fuel at two hundred miles per hour as a form of transcendence, and never once pauses over the exhaust. On the economic question, a scheming manager named Demille grumbles about contracts, and for a moment the sport admits it is a business. Then the film celebrates the machinery anyway. Body diversity is nowhere in evidence, the cast being uniformly lean and photogenic. Jimmy's lapses in concentration are diagnosed as pressure, not neurology, so that ledger stays empty as well.

The film does offer a sermon, though a mild one. Stallone's Joe dispenses old-school wisdom about work ethic, blocking for others, and knowing your place in the long race. It is racing philosophy delivered with a straight face, and it carries the faint whiff of instruction. The whole enterprise remains a curious artifact: a seventy-two million dollar production that grossed thirty-two million, collected seven Razzie nominations, and prompted its star to express regret. As a document of 2001's cultural priorities, it is nearly a blank page. As a racing film, it is mostly a montage with a soundtrack that shakes you like a motel bed, which a critic of the era observed, and which remains the most accurate note anyone struck about it. The checkered flag falls on a film that wanted nothing more than to go fast and be liked. It achieved one of those things, briefly, and then the standings were corrected by the market, as they always are. There is no lesson in it beyond the obvious one, which is that a movie about driving should probably have somewhere to go. This one idles. It idles loudly, expensively, and with Burt Reynolds in the passenger seat, and the classification of such an object is a task I perform without complaint, because someone must keep the ledger, and the ledger does not fill itself.

As a final matter of taxonomy, the film opened at number one domestically, a distinction it holds in the record alongside its other, less flattering honors. It is not a sequel, not a remake, not a true story, not an adaptation, and not a superhero picture, though Stallone's forearms make a reasonable argument otherwise. We classify what we are given. We do not embellish. The vault closes on another specimen, filed under the decade that did not yet know what it was about to become.