Baby’s getaway
Put the reserved kid behind a wheel and everything changes
IN A season of yet more synthetic blockbusters, Baby Driver feels entirely original. This is jukebox filmmaking, a wildly energetic movie whose characters behave in line with the songs that fill its soundtrack. It has soul, blues, jazz, a bit of punk, Britpop, easy listening, some glam rock and even a little Simon and Garfunkel.
Much of the pleasure here lies in the sheer zest and ingenuity with which writer-director Edgar Wright moulds the music to the mood – and vice versa. His screenplay rivals that written by Quentin Tarantino for True Romance (1993) both in its wisecracking wit and the way it combines hardboiled gangster movie tropes with youthful romanticism.
Wright has cast the film in a sly way. The main character, Baby, is played by Ansel Elgort, the young American actor best known for the tearjerker The Fault In Our Stars (2014). He’s the clean-cut boy next door type and yet Wright has him playing a getaway driver. “He’s a good kid and a devil behind the wheel,” we’re told.
His routine is always the same. On any given heist he’ll take his timings from the song he has chosen from one of his many iPods. Driving for him is akin to performance art. He’ll mouth the words of a song as he shifts gears, accelerates, reverses and whips up speed. His reactions are lightning-quick but he has an innocent enthusiasm that distinguishes him from older, more world-weary types behind the wheel like, say, Steve McQueen in Bullitt (1968) or Ryan Gosling in Drive (2011).
Wright surrounds his juvenile lead with ruthless career criminals. Kevin Spacey is cast true to type as the sleekly malevolent mastermind Doc, who plots the heists. Doc has some mysterious hold over Baby and regards his fresh-faced young driver as his lucky charm. He hires some real pieces of work to do the robbing.
Buddy (Mad Men’s Jon Hamm), an unshaven, hedonistic wastrel, and his glamorous and sleazy girlfriend, Darling (Eiza Gonzalez), are tolerant toward Baby but that’s more than can be said of the trigger-happy Bats (Jamie Foxx). They’re suspicious of their driver’s calmness, his youth and his near silence.
Near the start of the movie, Wright throws in a tremendous Fast and Furious-style chase sequence which entails Baby roaring the wrong way up freeways, squeezing his car through the narrowest of gaps, running past countless red lights and wreathing his way through traffic as the cops follow. He is a
virtuoso – Mozart in a Go-Kart, as he is nicknamed – and “too fast to die”.
Early on, the film feels like a spoof: a cartoonish, tongue in cheek version of the traditional Hollywood heist movie touched with Wright’s familiar British irony.
The film, though, has an unexpectedly nasty streak. Subliminal flashbacks hint at distressing events in Baby’s childhood and explain why he is just so obsessed with his mother. As the heists continue, we realise that innocent people as well as guilty ones are dying in profuse numbers. Buddy and Bats have little compunction about using their guns.
Amid the mayhem, Wright chronicles the burgeoning affair between Baby and the beautiful young waitress Debora (Lily James) he meets in his regular diner. As they joke about songs, make small talk about their respective names and go to the laundrette together, they behave like young lovers on leave from some 1980s bratpack movie.
Occasionally, the film risks stalling and becoming self-conscious and even pretentious. Whenever this happens, though, all it needs is for Baby to get back behind the wheel with some new music to inspire him.
“Don’t trust anybody but each other, and don’t look back,” is the advice he and Debora are given as they take to the road. It may sound glib but that doesn’t make it any less exhilarating.