Drive My Car

 

Japanese director Ryûsuke Hamaguchi's screen adaptation of a Haruki Murakami short story, the Oscar-nominated Drive My Car, is exquisite, not just because it is so artfully, deliberately and meticulously crafted -- that would simply make it "precious" -- but because it plumbs deep into emotional complexity to answer how and why we move forward from loss and regret.

Hidetoshi Nishijima plays an itinerant stage actor and director who accepts a contract to direct a Japanese translation of Uncle Vanya in Hiroshima. (The text and the location offer brilliant illumination on the characters' own struggles.) The theater company hires a driver for the director, a stoic young woman (Tôko Miura) and it is their evolving relationship -- which grows during their many hours commuting from the director's home to the theater -- that is the movie's central concern.

Fueling the director's ruminations about sadness and sacrifice are two other relationships -- that between him and his television screenwriter wife (Reika Kirishima) and between the director and a young man in the Vanya cast who may have been the wife's lover, played by Toshiaki Inomata. Murakami does not deal with two-dimensional characters in his stories, which are often elliptical, so Hamaguchi's treatment of these complexities is similarly rich and contemplative.

A three-hour running time and subtitles will no doubt put off many (most?) movie watchers, but the artistry in the film and what it has to say about the restoration of the human spirit are well-worth the investment, to wit, even scars that are deep are not always permanent.