DRIVING MISS DAISY
A film review by Rogers Cadenhead
Copyright 1990 Rogers Cadenhead
I just saw DRIVING MISS DAISY this week, and I enjoyed the film because it was made by people who know how to keep quiet. The American cinema today is filled with brash, boisterous films where shootouts are common and confrontations are as dramatic and polarized as the hero-villain relationship in LETHAL WEAPON II: The black cop faced South African stooges and the stooges also just happened to be the guys who killed the white cop's beloved wife. Can there be a more cut-and-dried (black-and-white) case of justifiable provocation than that? Blow 'em up real good, Murtaugh! Riggs! Hooray!
In DAISY, the biggest confrontations of the whole film involve a can of salmon and an insidiously phrased sentence by a cop. The salmon was supposed to be Daisy's evidence that Hoke, her black chauffeur, was a thief. The sentence, "What kind of name is Werthan?" showed the true face of racism and anti-Semitism. It isn't -- at least not for the vast majority -- bovine men in hoods with burning torches and rope. It is people in power who use their hate to oppress people in seemingly negligible ways because they know they can get away with it. The cops saw a "nigger and an old Jew woman" and decided they were suspicious. And they have a right to check out suspicious people.
That scene with the two policeman sunk into my gut, and that sinking was a surprise to me. Nothing in MISSISSIPPI BURNING was quite as painful, even though it was a painful film about a painful time. But DAISY hurt more because it was more real.
When filmmakers (and excellent performers) can strip away the excesses of drama and show bits of unmasked reality like that, it is an achievement. Jessica Tandy (Daisy) and the film deserved their accolades. (On a not-entirely-unrelated note, DO THE RIGHT THING was unjustly snubbed -- Spike Lee is the most real filmmaker to come along in years. He has more to say about black America as a segment and part of the whole than any legion of sensitive white liberals in the entertainment business).
Rogers Cadenhead
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