DRIVING MISS DAISY
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
Copyright 1990 Mark R. Leeper
Capsule review: Good but disappointing story (after its reputation) of a cantankerous, aging Southern woman and the chauffeur hired for her over her protests. Good performances but the mechanics of the play that should make us care for these characters and convince us that two decades are really passing are strangely absent. Rating: low +2.
Daisy Werthan is at war with the world and the world does not even notice it. At 72 she is still desperately holding on to her dignity, but she is having increasing problems interfacing with the world. Her response is to lash out at anyone around and then go back to her lonely, insular world. As the film opens she is preparing to drive herself somewhere, only to end up wrecking her car instead. Her son decides it is time to hire someone to do her driving for her, but she wants no part of the plan. Her son hires Hoke Colburn for the job, but Daisy refuses to give him anything to do, at least at first. DRIVING MISS DAISY covers in all too short a span of minutes the next two decades of so of the relationship of Daisy and Hoke. We see both reacting to the prejudice around them against each's group: racism against Hoke's race, anti-Semitism against Daisy's religion. Hoke tries to be sympathetic. Daisy does not try as hard. Most of her impulses are selfish.
DRIVING MISS DAISY seems to be a sentimental favorite for Oscar nominations this year, but in some ways it is a disappointment. The film's screenplay is by Alfred Uhry, based on his Broadway play and it is perhaps his writing that gives the film both its best aspects and its greatest flaws. In the course of the film it is obvious why Daisy, portrayed by Jessica Tandy, is so unpleasant. But the unpleasantness is so rarely relieved that understanding why she is the way she is is not enough. It perhaps is realistic that Daisy is so rarely likable, but it is dramatically unsatisfying. Perhaps she is more than one-dimensional, but she is less than three. Perhaps the story is really more Hoke's story, but here too the writing is lacking. Morgan Freeman does as much with a smaller supporting role in GLORY as he does with Hoke in this film. Perhaps at the beginning he is a little more countrified and later he is a little more dignified, but he too seems pretty much fixed in time. Time is shown to pass very awkwardly in DRIVING MISS DAISY. There is a change of props, a graying in the makeup, but we are told of rather than feel the passage of time. By comparison, in a film like SAME TIME, NEXT YEAR (also adapted from a Broadway play), the passage of time is keenly felt, and in that film the characters do change and are not so fixed in time.
This is not to say that the film does not have its tender moments, but every time Daisy shows some consideration for Hoke, they seem dramatically to be saying it is a major victory, and frankly it just is not satisfying enough. Freeman turns in as good a performance as the story allows him. So does Tandy. Aykroyd turns in his best performance ever as Boolie, Daisy's son, but none of these performances makes for a character one really wants to know, not even Freeman's. There just is not enough to turn this from a good film into a truly memorable one. My rating is a low +2 on the -4 to +4 scale.
Mark R. Leeper
att!mtgzx!leeper
leeper@mtgzx.att.com
.
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews