Driving Miss Daisy (1989) Review

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 does not 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, which is 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 genuinely excellent work, and the film they are in has decided that the racial arrangement of Georgia between 1948 and 1973 is the backdrop to a friendship.

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, which is 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, which is the correct and harder reading.

Tandy also plays the physical decline across twenty-five years without prosthetics doing the work. 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 is 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 cannot 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 has 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 cannot read, he says so, and she teaches him from the letters she knows are there, and the scene is played without either of them commenting on what has just been established.

What the Film Declines

The period is 1948 to 1973 in Atlanta and the film covers it as weather.

The specific events are present. A synagogue is bombed, which 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 is 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.

The bombing is the other one. Daisy’s synagogue is attacked, she is 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 precisely 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 does not, and then does nothing further with it.

The Structure Is the Problem

The film is 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, which is 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, which 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 cannot make that claim. Once you photograph Atlanta in 1955, the photography is a statement about Atlanta in 1955, and declining to examine what is in the frame is a decision the audience receives.

That is the adaptation failure and it is instructive. The same material in two forms has different obligations, and what a bare stage may abstract, a camera has documented.

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.

The film is also ninety-nine minutes, which nobody criticizes and which matters here. It is efficient and does not 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 is 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 is what is on screen.

That is what the objection to this film is really about. Not that it is racist, which it is not, but that it has two subjects and gives one of them an interior and the other a function.

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 was not nominated in the category. It received two nominations, for Aiello and for Lee’s screenplay, and won neither, and Lee was not nominated for direction.

This film also won without a Best Director nomination for Bruce Beresford, which has happened very rarely and is its own comment. The membership gave Best Picture to a film whose direction it did not 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.

Beresford also was not present at the ceremony, having been told the film had no chance, which is a detail everybody involved has repeated since. The production did not expect this and was as surprised as anybody.

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.

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