Baby Driver is a nitrous-fueled barenuckle chase screeching and stick-shifting to soulful rhythms, roaring straight out of the mind of Edgar Wright, acclaimed director of Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World.
It is Edgar Wright to the core. It is trademark Edgar Wright. It is filled with the same filmmaking tics, tricks, and techniques - including those calling-card quick cuts - that have exemplified his work going all the way back to Spaced in 1999. As a story it isn’t, apart from its central conceit, highly original, in fact it is derivative of a lot of similar films, but it is pulled off with such confidence and panache that it ends up being a slick and effective thrill ride.
And that’s the intro. Lovely. Time for a coffee.
Fridge open. Coffee grabbed. Coffee spooned into mako pot. Spilt coffee swept off counter. Kettle filled. Hob flamed. Pot on hob. Clock ticking, tick-tock, tick-tock. Ping. Pot removed. Mug down. Coffee poured. And drink. Ahhh.
Where were we? Baby Driver is a film about a young getaway driver called Baby, played by Ansel Elgort. He’s got tinnitus, poor Baby, a result of the childhood car crash that killed his parents, and he copes by drowning out the buzzing in his ears with music played over headphones from a selection of iPods he carries with him - which iPods are now apparently anachronistic relics of a bygone age, as antiquated a concept as radial-dial telephones, typewriters, or political leaders not hell-bent on thrusting the world into a new Dark Age).
But so thus most of the film’s sequences are choreographed to the tunes Baby listens to, the diegetic music becoming the soundtrack, the world pulsing and flowing to the beat when Baby is in sync with his surroundings, halting and jerking incongruously when he is out of whack. It’s a nice conceit, and feels like a natural progression of Wright’s style. His editing has always had a musical rhythm to it; here that is externalised and underlined for all to see, and hear.
Anyway: story. You’d think after the orphaning car crash Baby would have developed a phobia of all car-related activities, but he has in fact gone in the opposite direction, becoming a preternatural whizz behind the wheel, a Subaru-situated speed freak, capable of the kinds of vehicular feats only imaginable if your last name is Bond. Or Bourne. Or whatever Ryan Gosling’s character is called in Drive. Or Nolan-era Bruce Wayne. Or anyone from any Fast and Furious or Gone in 60 Seconds film. Or the Blues Brothers.
Baby got himself into a spot of bother, a few years previously to the events of the film, by boosting the car of criminal mastermind Kevin Spacey (playing a character less reprehensible than the actual Kevin Spacey, it now transpires), and is now working as the suited gangster’s preferred getaway driver on heist jobs to pay off his debt to the boss man.
Cue glamourous chase sequences tying local cops in knots speeding the wrong way down freeways and in and out of car parks and over ramps and up sidewalks and all those set pieces you know and love, all lurching to the perfectly chosen tunes blasting from Baby’s ear buds.
He eats getaway jobs like these for breakfast, does Baby, but he dreams of more. Or less, as form dictates. No more the thrill-ride life of crime, into which he has fallen as coping mechanism, and within which he has then become trapped, rather than chosen. All he wants is to hit the road with the waitress at his local diner, to turn the radio way up, and drive off into the sunset. But with one last job to pull off for Spacey’s character, it falls to ask questions such as: Will all go to plan? (No.) Will Spacey let Baby go free with no strings attached? (No.) Will Baby be forced to confront the ghosts of his past and face the centre of power in his worldview to wrestle control of his destiny back into his own hands, which hands will in the pivotal moment be firmly gripping the plush leather of a finely tuned automobile’s steering wheel? (Come on, you know the answer.)
Like I said, the narrative is far from experimental. It adheres to formula to such a degree that you could believe it was pieced together in a Robert McKee screenwriting workshop, ticking off one ESSENTIAL SCREENPLAY ELEMENT after another. The characters - most of whom comprise a ragtag bunch of hoodlums brought in for the criminal jobs, including John Hamm and Jamie Foxx - are differentiated, memorable, yet cartoonish. The waitress, played by Lily James, appropriately embodies all the freedom and acceptance for which Baby yearns - and is as empty of autonomy and framed through the male gaze as the women in these parts always are. She bears a striking resemblance, in fact, to Mädchen Amick’s diner gal Shelly Johnson from Twin Peaks, in both actress and character - minus the teeming underbelly of darkness to which the apple-pie surface was wryly contrasted by Lynch. The film doesn’t, of course, come close to passing the Bechdel Test.
Yet the point of Baby Driver isn’t the depth of the content so much as the enjoyment of its visualisation. Wright has always been a director wringing utter joy from the process of converting our world into filmmaking moments. He’s always thinking about the most visceral and satisfying ways to translate script into celluloid (or digital bytes). He wrings fun from the kinds of moments that most directors treat as bread-and-butter transitions, or flat coverage. Never the simple mid-shot for Wright, when a fast pivot, a close-up insert, and a zoom back could work instead.
It’s stylistic, for sure, and perhaps faintly one-note. He does better with action sequences and flair-filled scene transitions than moments of quiet contemplation; he’s not so much your guy for when you want the lens to disappear and the space within to be given room to breathe, the emotions develop. He’s not subtle. But in terms of broad and bold films for wide audiences, for filling cineplexes, he has a grinning elan that is up there with the best.
It’s gratifying, as well, to have followed his career all these years, and to see that he’s still essentially the same director, deploying the same techniques, as he was twenty years ago messing around on that little set (“It’s not a bedsit. It’s a flat.”) with Simon Pegg and Jessica Hynes and the rest. He has stayed remarkably true to his initial impulses.
What else? Ansel Elgort is very good, insular and sullen and principled and hopeful in equal measure. The ending is nice, not quite what I was expecting, but immediately appropriate.
The music is, of course, excellent, Queen and Simon & Garfunkel and T. Rex and Martha and the Vandellas brushing up against The Damned and Danger Mouse. It’s eclectic, feel-good, and only perhaps a touch too obvious.
I am going to take this opportunity though to come out and say it: I am utterly bored of mainstream Hollywood car chases. They’re the same scene over and over. They’re a codified formula by this point, and the only creativity comes in how to assemble the exact same structure with the exact same beats using details that haven’t quite been seen before. It’s a successful formula, for sure, I’m just sick of it. So there.
But then maybe mainstream cinema isn’t the place to reinvent the wheel. You just turn the wheel as fast as you can, screech off the tarmac, and leave your mostly teenage audience thrilled and happy.
Baby Driver does this with aplomb. It is riotously funny, heartfelt, big and bold and colourful, and watching it is a joy. Not a nuanced or profound joy, but a joy nonetheless.
A road trip, then, that doesn’t go anywhere you haven’t been many times before, but this time in the sexiest car, with the most assured driver, and with the top down and the wind whipping your hair, you can’t help but smile.
Sorted. Now just... Scanning for typos. Highlight "[word when music is part of the scene]", right-click, search Google. Scrolling down page. Scanning. Stop on "diegetic". Highlight, copy, alt-tab, paste. And publish post.
Then feet down stairs. Boil kettle. Pour tea. Tap spoon on rim. Lean back in chair. Sigh.
Ahh. Another day complete. Lovely.
Made me smile. Thanks
ReplyDeleteYou're very welcome :)
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