‘Baby Driver’ (2017) ****/*****
I’ve found a driver, and that’s a start
Whenever a new Edgar Wright movie is released, it’s a big event for cinema freaks and genre geeks. Not only are his movies always well-made, and always fun, and always funny, but they also always serve as love letters to past movies from whatever genre he’s currently working in. Shaun of the Dead was dripping with love for zombie movies, Hot Fuzz was soaked in appreciation for cheesy action movies, and so on and so forth. It’s not hard to see that Wright has a serious appreciation of movies, and that not only informs his craft, it infuses his work with a sense of joyous love. Geek recognize geek.
Baby Driver is Wright’s take on the sub-genre of action films that we’ll call getaway driver movies. You know, like Walter Hill’s The Driver from 1978, or Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive from 2011. Less specifically, it’s a car chase movie, and I’m sure everybody can name plenty of those. Baby (Ansel Elgort) is our titular driver, a sweetheart of a babyfaced kid who made some mistakes early in his troubled life and now finds himself paying off a debt to a crime boss played by Kevin Spacey. He seems pretty content living a quiet life of automotive crime until he meets a pretty waitress named Debora (Lily James), who also seems to like music as much as he does, but mostly is very pretty. Suddenly, the things he’s doing seem pretty immoral, the life he’s living seems pretty unsustainable, and before he knows it, Baby finds himself on the run from not only his former colleagues, but also police officers both dirty and straight. It’s all a really good excuse to fill a movie with a bunch of car chases.
Interestingly enough, it’s not entirely the car chase movie that Wright is drowning in love for this time around. Even though Baby Driver is full of spectacular chase scenes that are high energy, intricately staged, and impeccably executed, the heart of this film is very much rooted in old school studio musicals and their enhanced realities, vivid colors, big emotions, and optimistic, idealistic romance. I’m not just saying that to be cute, either. This movie is a musical. The actual music comes from a pop music soundtrack, but the songs are built into the DNA of what you’re seeing on the screen — so much so that the scenes are blocked according to the beats of the songs chosen. It’s like what Wes Anderson does — writing scenes around the soundtrack he’s chosen rather than the other way around — but kicked up a hundred notches. Visual flourishes that appear on the screen reflect the lyrics that are being crooned on whatever jam we happen to be listening to. When there’s a shootout, the guns fire in sync with the drum solo in the iconic party song ‘Tequila.’ The music in this film doesn’t just color the action that’s happening on the screen, it dictates it, which is the difference between it being a car chase movie with a good soundtrack and being an actual musical.
Wright has always distinguished his movies, stylistically, through the rhythm of his editing — by crafting kinetic sequences of repetitive images that you can almost tap your toe to. He really brings that up to a new level here, to where we’re not just presenting montage sequences or flashy action scenarios in this style, but we’re using it throughout the entire movie. In many ways, it feels like this is the film he’s been building up to over the course of his entire career so far. If you’re the sort of person who cringes whenever the heavy hand of a film’s direction becomes apparent while you’re watching it, then Baby Driver could very well be the most annoying thing that you ever sit through, however, if you like stylish filmmaking that has its own voice and that sets itself apart from everything else around it, you’re not likely to see a more satisfying movie this year.
The biggest focus of this film aside from its music and chases is its romance, so you need a pair of great actors with great chemistry to make that work. Elgort and James deliver. This is the first time I’ve seen an Ansel Elgort film. He’s interesting. He’s very unassuming-looking, and he’s not doing much, performance-wise, but he’s able to broadcast the notion that there’s a deep well of soul inside him, nonetheless. I’d like to see what he does when he’s playing a character who isn’t so restrained. Lily James is such a likable screen presence that she can even go through this whole movie putting a honey-touched Georgia accent on everything she says and not come off as being cloying. She turned heads as the girl who’s bad news on Downton Abbey, she proved that she could shoulder a big budget movie with Cinderella, and she proves that she can hold her own in a stylish, aimed-toward-movie-dorks movie like this. As far as I can tell, the girl can do it all. And she certainly looks the part. There should be nothing but big things ahead of her.
The supporting performances are all pretty strong, but one of the most satisfying things about Baby Driver is seeing Jon Hamm get something great to do. His lead performance in Mad Men was so iconic, and ever since that show ended he’s pretty much been relegated to acting silly doing Meta stuff in comedies. It’s fun that he’s good at stuff like that, and that he’s not afraid to engage with his public persona, but the dude is much too handsome and much too good at selling internal conflict to be relegated to silliness. Here he really gets to sink his teeth into some meaty material, and the charisma comes out. Jamie Foxx plays one of the criminals, and he doesn’t get a whole ton to do, but he’s playing the wild card of the film and he brings a real dangerous energy to everything he does. Pretty much every time he’s on screen he makes you uncomfortable in some way. Spacey, Jon Bernthal, and Eiza González round out the crew, and they’re welcome additions to the cast, but they’re basically playing to type, so there’s not much to be said about them. To be fair, this is the first time I’ve seen Eiza in anything, so I can’t comment on what she might be capable of, but she’s mostly just being fiery, young, and sexy here, which wouldn’t surprise me if it was her type — the casting process in Hollywood being so predictable and whatnot.
Wright’s script is near-perfect action writing. The characters are generally tight-lipped, so we learn about them through their actions, as they move through the story. The danger and difficulty of the situations Baby finds himself in continually escalate, so it always feels like the film is building toward something. The romantic subplot isn’t kept separate from the getaway driver plot, but is instead tied directly into it, at least as far as the protagonist’s emotional state is concerned, which helps make everything matter. The more his new relationship looks like it has the legit possibility of improving his life, the more dire his situation of being trapped in a criminal life becomes. His desperation to find a way out grows, the safety of the situations he finds himself in lessens, and the interpersonal cracks that have appeared between him and the eccentric group of psychopaths he’s working with widen. That provides the film with a building tension that eventually boils over when the final heist is about to take place — a job that’s been so snake-bitten from the start that you know it’s going to dissolve into deadly chaos. The big action finale is spectacular. The emotional stakes are there, the life and death stakes are there, and everything happening on the screen spins out of control into complete, glorious chaos. Well-orchestrated chaos, of course. This is an Edgar Wright film, after all, and he’s a meticulous craftsman, so his third act becomes an almost literal symphony of tire squeals, gunfire, explosions, and toe-tapping favorites. It’s hard to imagine coming out of the other side of all that unsatisfied.
