Driving Miss Daisy (1989) Review
5/10
An elderly widow in Atlanta crashes her car and her son hires a driver. She refuses to be driven for six days. Over the following twenty-five years they establish a relationship, and the state around them changes in ways the film mentions and doesn’t follow.
The film also gives those six days properly. She walks, takes a streetcar, refuses the car in the driveway, and Hoke is paid to sit in a kitchen doing nothing. That’s a better opening than any confrontation would have been. The 5 is the average of the acting and everything else. Tandy and Freeman are doing excellent work, and the film they’re in has decided that the racial arrangement of Georgia between 1948 and 1973 is the backdrop to a friendship. I’m torn in half on this one. Tandy and Freeman are so good together that I kept wanting to forgive the film, and the film kept giving me reasons not to. It’s a warm, handsomely made movie that looks straight at Jim Crow Georgia and decides its subject is who drives the car. This is the most cited entry on this page and the citation is fair. What makes it worth reviewing carefully is that the failure is structural instead of a matter of intention.
It also cost around seven and a half million dollars and took over one hundred and forty-five. That’s the other half of why it won. A small film that outperforms its budget by that margin arrives at a ceremony with a narrative attached to it.
The Two Performances
Jessica Tandy won Best Actress at eighty and the performance is the film’s best element by a distance.
Daisy is difficult, proud, tight with money, frightened of being managed, and specific about all of it. Tandy plays the objection to being driven as a woman resisting the loss of independence and not as prejudice. That’s the correct and harder reading. Tandy also plays the physical decline across twenty-five years without relying on prosthetics. The posture changes, the walk changes, and the last act is a woman in a facility who has lost most of her memory and none of her specificity. Her last scene is in a care facility and the film ends on it and not on anything resolved. He feeds her a piece of pie, she’s mostly gone, and the picture closes on a small domestic act instead of a statement.
Morgan Freeman had played the part on stage and the performance is a study in calibration. Hoke is courteous, patient, and continuously assessing what he can and can’t say, and Freeman plays the calculation without ever letting it show to Daisy. The salmon tin is the sharpest small scene in the film. He takes one without asking, tells her he’s taken it, and leaves the money, and the exchange is about credit and trust conducted entirely through a can of fish.
The best scene between them is the cemetery. She asks him to find a headstone, he can’t read, he says so, and she teaches him from the letters she knows are there, and both actors play the scene without commenting on what has just been established. That cemetery scene is the best thing in the movie and the main reason the rating isn’t lower. I admire how little anybody says in it. Two actors, a headstone and a secret, and the film trusts me to understand what just happened.
A character continuously assessing what they can say is doing two things in every line. Freeman plays the calculation and hides it from the other character while showing it to the audience. That double channel is available in prose through free indirect style and is almost never used this well.
Give the prejudice a competing motive. Daisy’s objection is partly about independence. That makes her harder to dismiss and harder to forgive.
Establish something enormous and let nobody comment. The illiteracy scene works because the film moves on immediately.
What the Film Declines
The period is 1948 to 1973 in Atlanta and the film covers it as weather.
The events are present. A synagogue is bombed. That happened. A state trooper stops the car and makes a remark. Martin Luther King speaks at a dinner Daisy attends and Hoke waits outside in the car. Each of those is a scene and none of them changes anything.
The King dinner is the clearest failure and it’s the film’s own best material misused. Daisy invites Hoke, he declines, and the film treats his refusal as pride, when a man being invited as an accessory to somebody else’s moral evening has an entirely different objection available.
Freeman gives Hoke all the dignity that refusal needs, and the script shrinks it to wounded pride. That’s the first place the film loses me, because the better idea was sitting right there and the film walked past it.
The bombing is the other one. Daisy’s synagogue is attacked, she’s frightened, Hoke tells her about a lynching he witnessed as a child, and the film puts two forms of American violence in one conversation and then returns to the drive.
Her response to it is also sharply written. She asks who would do such a thing, is told, and immediately reframes it as something aimed at somebody else, and the film lets her do that without comment. The Alabama trip is the other missed sequence. The two of them drive south together, the state trooper stops them, and the film uses the incident to establish that Hoke needs papers and Daisy doesn’t, and then does nothing further with it.
The Structure Is the Problem
It’s a two-hander adapted from a two-hander, and the stage version’s limits become the film’s argument without anybody deciding. Alfred Uhry’s play has three characters and a bare stage. That’s a form in which a friendship across a racial line can be the entire subject legitimately. Nothing in a theater is claiming to depict Georgia.
Uhry wrote it from his own grandmother and her driver. That explains the film’s center of gravity. The material arrived as one family’s memory and never expanded past what that memory contained. A film can’t make that claim. Once you photograph Atlanta in 1955, the photography is a statement about Atlanta in 1955, and declining to examine what’s in the frame is a decision the audience receives.
That’s the adaptation failure and it’s instructive. The same material in two forms has different obligations, and what a bare stage may abstract, a camera has documented.
Adapting a chamber piece to film changes what the work is claiming. A bare stage abstracts and a camera documents, and the photographed background becomes part of your argument whether you examine it or not. Decide what your frame contains before you decide what your scene is about. A two-hander on film must defend its exclusions. Everything outside the two people is visible. That means the audience is asking why it’s not the subject.
Stage limits aren’t film limits. Inheriting them produces a film that looks like it is avoiding something instead of one that’s concentrating.
Who Is Absent
Hoke has a family and the film mentions them. He has a daughter, grandchildren, a life away from the house, and none of it appears.
Daisy’s interior life is given two hours. Hoke’s is given a handful of lines, and the asymmetry is the film’s central structural fact. Its running time is also ninety-nine minutes, which nobody criticizes and which matters here. It’s efficient and doesn’t sprawl, and the brevity is a large part of why the omissions are as visible as they are.
Idella, the housekeeper, is the most revealing absence. She’s in the house throughout the first half, has a relationship with both of them, dies offscreen, and the film’s response is a scene about who will now cook.
Esther Rolle plays her and had been a lead on television for years, and the part is four or five scenes of domestic work and an offscreen death. Whatever the film thought it was doing with her, that’s what’s on screen.
That’s the heart of my objection. I don’t think the film is racist, and I still can’t get past the fact that it has two subjects and gives one of them an interior and the other a function. Idella is where the film fails worst. Esther Rolle had been a television lead for years, and this film hands her a kitchen and a death we never even see. I’d have given her one scene of her own, and I think the whole picture would have tilted.
1990
Best Picture went to this. The other nominees were Born on the Fourth of July, Dead Poets Society, Field of Dreams and My Left Foot. Do the Right Thing wasn’t nominated in the category. It received two nominations, for Aiello and for Lee’s screenplay, and won neither, and Lee wasn’t nominated for direction. This film also won without a Best Director nomination for Bruce Beresford. It has happened very rarely and is its own comment. The membership gave Best Picture to a film whose direction it didn’t think was among the year’s five best. The pairing has become the standard example in any discussion of the Academy, and the reason is that the two films are about the same country in the same year and one of them is about a comfortable version of the question.
What happened at that ceremony galls me more than the film does. The membership rewarded the comfortable version of the question and left the uncomfortable one out of Best Picture entirely, and nobody who made this film asked them to.
Beresford also wasn’t present at the ceremony, having been told the film had no chance. That’s a detail everybody involved has repeated since. The production didn’t expect this and was as surprised as anybody.
Two works on the same subject in the same year will be compared permanently and the comparison will outlive both. That’s not something either author controls. It has damaged the one on this page and elevated the other, and neither outcome is about the individual works.
An interior for one subject and a function for the other is the failure. It’s detectable, it’s fixable at the outline stage, and it’s almost never noticed by the people making the thing. Count the scenes your second protagonist has alone. If the answer is none, they’re not a protagonist. Run that test on this film and the result is clear. Daisy gets scenes of her own, Hoke gets almost none, and that imbalance was decided before a frame was shot.
Should you watch Driving Miss Daisy?
For Tandy and Freeman, and with the objection standing. Two excellent performances, a cemetery scene about literacy that neither character comments on, a bombing and a King speech treated as weather, and twenty-five years of Georgia used as the setting for a friendship.
I give it a 5, and it’s a tug of war.
Tandy and Freeman pull it up, the salmon tin and the cemetery pull it up, and every time the film glances at Georgia and looks away, it drops again. I’d happily watch those two actors share a kitchen for hours. I just wish the movie had cared about Hoke’s life half as much as it cared about Daisy’s.
