Baby Driver
Best movie of the summer?
Baby Driver 15 cert, 113 min ★★★★★ Dir: Edgar Wright; Starring: Ansel Elgort, Kevin Spacey, Lily James, Jamie Foxx, CJ Jones, Jon Hamm, Eiza González, Jon Bernthal
The fact that the DNA of Edgar Wright’s new film has been lying dormant in the lyrics of a Simon & Garfunkel B-side for almost half a century just makes it even more of a delight. “I was born one dark grey morn with music coming in my ears,” the duo crooned on 1969’s Baby Driver: “They call me Baby Driver, and once upon a pair of wheels, I hit the road and I’m gone.”
Those lyrics sum up everything that matters about Wright’s latest picture – a car-chase thriller about a getawaydriving cutie-pie savant whose every move behind the wheel is in Olympiclevel sync with whichever song is pulsing in his ipod earbuds. Bernardo Bertolucci was once credited with making “intravenous cinema”, but there’s no better imaginable description of Baby Driver.
The film’s clicky synergy of music and movement is its big selling point, and is set out immediately in a breathless introductory bank heist. Baby (Ansel Elgort) revs and swerves his cherry-bright Subaru in time to Bellbottoms, by The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion – the first in a nearunbroken string of songs Baby cues up as an on-the-hoof soundtrack. Three further members of the stick-up crew, played by Eiza González and the Jons Hamm and Bernthal, gawp ecstatically in their seats throughout, and their astonishment is catching. While the cleverness of the cutting stuns you for the first verse or so, once the chorus kicks in and the pursuit begins in earnest, you stop actively noticing the technique, and start to ride it.
Wright has been rattling away in the language of pulp cinema since the very start. Even in Spaced, the turn-of-the-millennium TV show he created with Jessica Stevenson and Simon Pegg, every whip pan, crash zoom and smash cut served its purpose. But while the manoeuvres seemed like studious retro-homages in that series and the trilogy of British-set comedies that followed it – Shaun of the Dead (2004), Hot Fuzz (2007), The World’s End (2013) – and to me, anyway, laboured affectations in his comic-book adaptation Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (2010), here they feel completely organic, newly laser-honed and glidingly intuitive. That’s thanks in part to treating every action sequence like a musical number: in interviews, Wright has explained he rigged every set-piece around its backing track. That stylistic choice
‘The film’s clicky synergy of music and movement is its big selling point and is set out immediately’
keeps Baby Driver a canvas-shoed hop and skip apart from its most familiar forebears – not least the planed-down 1978 chase movie The Driver, directed by Walter Hill, whose crunchy baritone makes a brief off-screen cameo. But it also couldn’t have worked without Elgort, who was something of a charming blank slate in films like The Fault in Our Stars and the Divergent franchise, but who under Wright’s direction proves to be one of those great screen movers like Richard Gere or Channing Tatum: you just want to watch him do stuff.
Swinging and spinning in a plain white tee, dark skinny jeans and off-brand sunglasses, Elgort brings a physical musicality to every on-screen task. Spindly, boyish, and landing on the complexion spectrum somewhere between baby’s bottom and nectarine, Elgort is the same kind of counterintuitive leading man as Michael Cera in Scott Pilgrim – though unlike Cera, he doesn’t act in airquotes, and commits sincerely to the fun and urgency of every moment. That’s not to say Baby Driver jettisons the arch tone of Wright’s earlier films. It just keeps the archness carefully apart from the film’s story-world. So when Kevin Spacey, having a ball as the gang’s leader Doc, annunciates every malice-tipped line as if it’s destined for the trailer, or Lily James, as Baby’s waitress girlfriend Debora, drawls dreamily of “heading west on 20 in a car I can’t afford, with a plan I don’t have”, no one on-screen flinches.
In fact, the film is so in love with the snappiness of its script, the characters keep remixing their own and each other’s dialogue. “You rob to support a drug habit, I do drugs to support a robbery habit”, offers Jamie Foxx’s psychopathic Bats.
The mechanisms at work in Baby Driver, while calibrated with hair’sbreadth precision, are nothing new. Here’s what is: the sheer glee with which the film prods around in its own clockwork to show you what spins what. It’s like watching a magician perform the greatest card trick you’ve ever seen while simultaneously explaining how it’s done, and being stunned twice over.