BUCKLE UP FOR A JOYRIDE Brian Viner
Fast, furious and with a stonking soundtrack, this gripping getaway caper gives Tarantino a run for his money . . .
EDGAr WrIGhT, writer and director of the thrilling Baby Driver, hails from sleepy Somerset. Of course, everyone has to come from somewhere — Alfred hitchcock was a son of drab, suburban Leytonstone.
But it’s still kind of marvellous that a fellow who grew up in the shadow of the Mendip hills, and whose last film, 2013’s The World’s end, was inspired by a teenage pub-crawl he once went on in Wells, has now created a roaringly high-octane crime movie reminiscent of the best of Quentin Tarantino.
Baby Driver is set in Atlanta, Georgia. Its hero is a fresh-faced getaway driver, nicknamed Baby (Ansel elgort), whose job is to whisk ruthless, armed bank-robbers from the scene of their latest heist.
This he does brilliantly, but he is a reluctant participant, coerced into high-stakes crime by a gangster called Doc (Kevin Spacey), as payback for once trying to steal Doc’s car.
So far, so unoriginal. Indeed, Wright makes a virtue of filling his film with plotlines so familiar they almost count as clichés. We’ve all seen a million heists, car chases, menacing Mr Bigs, and protagonists falling for sweet waitresses in diners, which is what happens here to Baby, as soon as he sets eyes on Debora, winningly played by Lily James.
She is a dreamer, a romantic, whose ambitions extend no further than heading west ‘on 20, in a car we can’t afford, with a plan we don’t have’. And she reminds Baby of his dead mother, who — another cliché — he keeps picturing in flashbacks.
So what turns the clichéd and commonplace into virtues? It’s the way Wright, sometimes obviously, sometimes with deft subtlety, references other films. There are repeated nods to Tarantino’s reservoir Dogs, for example, and to Walter hill’s 1978 film The Driver. The Pixar animation Monsters, Inc. actually gets a namecheck.
And when Baby loses one lens from his sunglasses during a getaway, Wright plainly intends it as a homage to Warren Beatty’s character in the iconic ambush scene from Bonnie And Clyde.
But there is something else, something more that stops this film looking stylish, but essentially derivative, and makes it excitingly, enticingly original. It is, in a word, music.
Baby has been left with tinnitus from a childhood road accident that killed both his parents. he drowns it out by plugging his iPod into his ears, turning his life into one long playlist.
When he waits outside banks for Doc’s everrotating crew, when he out-screeches the pursuing cops, even when he sits in on briefings for the next job, his constant companions are rock, r&B and disco music.
he even mixes his own tracks, secretly recording snatches of his accomplices’ conversations, then going home and turning them into his own, rather literal, version of gangsta rap.
Baby lives with his ageing, deaf foster father, Pops (CJ Jones), who knows the boy has a good heart but has fallen in with some dodgy characters.
And my, are they dodgy. Apart from Doc, they include a trigger-happy psycho called Bats (Jamie Foxx) and the scarcely less scary Griff (Jon Bernthal), neither of whom are comfortable in the company of the kid with the iPod fixation. Buddy (Jon hamm) seems more congenial, but then he has a respectable background as a banker. now he’s a gamekeeper turned poacher, on the run with his lap-dancer girlfriend, Darling (eiza Gonzalez).
Wright keeps the action more real and less exuberantly comedic than in his most successful films, Shaun Of The Dead (2004) and hot Fuzz (2007). he certainly doesn’t rein in the violence, which at times is gruesome and, it has to be said, somewhat glorified. But his playful side is never far away, even when things start to look deeply worrying for Baby, who is forced into one final raid on a post office just when he thought he had paid his dues. Will he get to head west on 20 with lovely Debora, or will he have to face the music?
All I’ll tell you is that it’s a blast and a joyride finding out. I think that if you love car chases, you’ll love this movie; Wright choreographs them superbly. And if you love music, you’ll probably love this movie; the soundtrack features something for everyone, including Queen, T.rex, The Beach Boys, The Damned, Dave Brubeck and, of course, singing the title song, Simon & Garfunkel.
I was going to add that if you love movies, you’ll more than likely love this movie, except that my wife has just come back from seeing it at
the Odeon Hereford on my thunderous recommendation — and pronounced it deeply disappointing, with ‘risible’ dialogue and ‘silly’ characterisations.
And her two friends thought the same. So maybe Baby Driver is this season’s La La Land, for which the critical hosannas were so loud that some audiences went away unimpressed. All the same, I’ll stick my neck out and anoint it with the full five stars.
n In Alone In Berlin, a decent, unremarkable, rather stolid couple called Anna and Otto Quangel (beautifully played by Emma Thompson and Brendan Gleeson) also stick their necks out, sounding their own feeble but stubborn counterblast to the nazi regime as World War II unfolds. Vincent Perez’s film is based on Hans Fallada’s compelling 1947 novel of the same name, which in turn told the true story of a husband and wife who are left grief-stricken by the death in battle of their only son.
Otto, a factory foreman, channels his hurt into a series of postcards, on which he writes treasonous messages damning Hitler and the German war effort.
With Anna’s help, he discreetly leaves the cards all over the city, much to the growing fury of the SS. The film’s tension stems from the efforts of a clever police chief (Daniel Bruhl) to track the miscreants down, but actually what I admired about it was its defiant lack of melodrama.
There is no chorus of jackboots crunching on gravel (which must be a first for a film set in Berlin in 1940), and, unlike the book, there’s no real indication that the propaganda has had the slightest effect in encouraging meaningful dissent against the nazis.
Of the 285 cards that Otto writes, 267 are handed straight to the authorities.
Instead, there is just a creeping sense of menace as the net closes around the Quangels, while Thompson and Gleeson, with their studiously understated yet powerful performances, show the nobility embodied in even futile resistance.
I found it a deeply moving film and a worthy monument to a pair of decidedly unlikely war heroes.