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starring
Morgan Freeman, Jessica Tandy, Dan Aykroyd, Patti Lupone
screenplay
by Alfred Uhry, based on his play
directed
by Bruce Beresford
by
Walter Chaw The heart-warming
story of how a bitter old Jewess learns to not be such a bitch to a
patient
Negro driver in an idyllic pre-integration South, Bruce Beresford's Driving
Miss Daisy, released the same year as other such landmark
films about race
as Ferris Bueller's Black Civil War Regiment and Do
the Right Thing,
discusses how forty-one years of forced companionship can overcome even
the
deepest-seated prejudices and resentments. Or, at least, dementia can.
We meet Ms. Daisy (Jessica Tandy) as she crashes her car, and we meet
Hoke
(Morgan Freeman) when he begs Miss Daisy's son Boolie (Dan Aykroyd) for
a job
as her chauffeur–meaning they're both prisoners of circumstance,
see? Meaning this is an unlikely but no less racially naïve remake of
Stanley
Kramer's embarrassing melodrama The Defiant Ones,
scored by Hans Zimmer
with outtakes from his synth-heavy, bullshit-rich Rain Man score,
all
teddy bears humping and building music boxes and shit. Meaning,
essentially, that we are to believe there is no substantive difference
between
a wealthy white woman needing to hire a driver and a destitute black
man looking for work in 1948 Atlanta. My favourite scene is either the
one where Hoke asks Miss Daisy's permission to make water, or the one
where
Hoke says something and Miss Daisy tells him to "be still."
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The most surprising thing about Driving Miss
Daisy now, some twenty-four years later, is that as it jumps forward
decade-by-decade, the age makeup is considerably better than any of the
crap used in last year's Hitchcock or
the also-post-racial
and deeply sensitive, time-skipping Cloud Atlas.
Did I mention
that Hoke is illiterate? You could argue that this represents a
real cross-section of Southern attitudes and how they evolved through
the Civil
Rights movement and into the modern day, or you could see it as
simpering,
middlebrow-pleasing pabulum meant to assure its middle-class elderly
white
audience that it's not racist and appreciates good, Oscar-feted movies
about
black folk (written/directed/produced by white folks) based on Pulitzer
Prize-winning plays (by white folks). It's 1989's Beasts of
the
Southern Wild, in other words, and if we're talking
progress, we can at
least say that although nominated for it and more, at least Beasts didn't
win Best Picture. Understand, I'm not saying it's
impossible
for white folks to write about black folks, I'm saying that when the
result is Driving
Miss Daisy or Beasts of the Southern Wild or
The Blind Side or The
Green Mile, the fact that its
creators are white folks is as good a place to start pointing fingers
as any.
Therefore, because it couldn't possibly be about
a bitter old Jewess learning to tolerate her obsequious Tom, here are
two
things Driving Miss Daisy might be
about: 1) It's a metaphor
for how the Old Hollywood elite (the Jews) treat African-Americans in
the same
way that Danny the Dog/Unleashed is about how American film
audiences treat Asian
actors; 2), and more subversively, no matter how much time passes,
minorities in popular entertainment will forever be viewed by the
majority as
servile, helpless/helpful ciphers defined by their relationship
to their master(s). There's something existential about both approaches
to the piece,
but neither read is extant in the text so much as possible through
objective
consideration of the fact of the text. Modern reads of Driving
Miss
Daisy have actually begun by decrying the backwards racial
attitudes of 1989–I'd offer that of all its crimes, having
dated racial attitudes is not one of them. The picture's popularity is
a
keen indictment of our culture. Frankly, we haven't come very far.
THE
BLU-RAY DISC
Warner brings their unexpected cash cow to
anachronistic HiDef in a 1.78:1, 1080p/AVC-encoded transfer
that looks diffuse and
dim, especially for something from this period–not all of it, perhaps, attributable
to the
shooting style or the heavy-handed seasonal metaphor that runs through the narrative and visual schema. (It's possible to know what they're up to
and still hate it, right?) The 2.0 DTS HD-MA track uses the non-centre speakers mainly to
transmit what is possibly Zimmer's worst score. It's so bad, I spent
most
of the time thinking it was James Horner. An attendant yakker
stitches together non-scene-specific snippets from director
Beresford, producer Lili Zanuck, and playwright/screenwriter Alfred Uhry, who reveals that the story was
based on
his grandmother and her relationship to her driver and, later, sort of
defends not
telling anything about Hoke's life as not believing that his life was
as
dramatically interesting as Hoke and Daisy's life together. Mmmm, yes. Zanuck, meanwhile, demonstrates a peculiar tone-deafness unique
to producers in talking about scouting locations and how she was more
than
happy, always, to accommodate extras and Beresford's needs. All join in
praising Tandy in the way we tend to speak kindly of old people.
It's
horribly condescending in the same way the character of Boolie's wife (Patti Lupone) is
treated
throughout, so…if we must argue that the film is racist, may we at
least not
argue that it's misogynistic?
"Miss Daisy's Journey from Stage to
Screen" (19 mins., SD) is redundant after the commentary track, though a minute is spared for the great makeup. "Jessica Tandy:
Theater
Legend to Screen Star" (7 mins., SD) is hagiography
through-and-through–and I'm
still waiting to see footage of her legendary turn as Blanche in
"Streetcar". A "Vintage Featurette" (6 mins., SD) is a complete waste of
life,
as is the original theatrical trailer (2 mins., SD). "Things Are Changing: The Worlds of
Hoke and Miss Daisy" (30 mins., HD) features Spike Lee…no, just
kidding,
it's a new featurette in which Uhry says he wanted "to
write
about prejudice" and Freeman won't admit that he'd likely not do this
movie
were it offered to him at this point in his career. Also contributing to the conversation are various Jewish
and Black
leaders, who remember how things were tough in the South. A 30-page
booklet in the packaging is basically fancy cast/crew biographies.
