SECOND SCREEN
In Learning To Drive (15A) ★★★★, Patricia Clarkson plays a newly separated New York book critic and Ben Kingsley the Sikh driving instructor who not only teaches her to drive but helps her put her life back together. But anyone expecting some sort of lightweight coming together of East and West, in the manner of, say, The Best
Exotic Marigold Hotel, is in for a surprise. The movie – directed by the Spanish filmmaker Isabel Coixet – has a raw ‘realness’ that particularly impresses. The pain of mid-life abandonment is captured in intense emotional detail, while the depiction of the lonely existence of a middle-aged immigrant working two jobs to make ends meet is similarly uncompromising. There are funny moments, but this could never be described as a comedy-drama.
Both Kingsley and Clarkson worked with Coixet on Elegy, one of my favourite films of 2008. But if that was Kingsley’s moment to shine – it’s one of his best screen performances – this time it’s definitely Clarkson’s turn, and despite moments when she ever so slightly overdoes the emotional overwroughtness, she’s very good indeed.
Looking blonde, well-groomed but authentically middle-aged, her performance as Wendy, who is devastated when her husband of 21 years leaves her for a younger woman, is so reminiscent of Meryl Streep that it’s no surprise to find Streep’s real-life daughter, Grace Gummer, playing Wendy’s daughter. Sarah Kernochan, who wrote 9½ Weeks,
Sommersby and What Lies Beneath, supplies an insightful screenplay that deals with illegal immigration, arranged marriage and institutional racism along the way to a touching and cleverly unexpected ending.
What with The Heat and Spy, Melissa McCarthy, above, has been on a roll of late, a run of box-office successes expected to continue when the long-awaited Ghostbusters remake hits cinemas next month.
But here’s something much less exciting she made earlier. Directed by her husband, Ben Falcone, and co-written by McCarthy herself,
The Boss (15A) ★★ is a somewhat formulaic comedy about a lonely but uncompromising