Driving Miss Daisy. - movie reviews

National Review, Feb 19, 1990 by John Simon

Driving Miss Daisy

Driving Miss Daisy accomplishes the impossible task of transferring a small, intimate three-character play that uses specifically theatrical, non-naturalistic devices to the realistic screen without losing its modest, bittersweet charm. Well, to be quite honest, it does lose some, but not enough to prevent the movie from being penetrant and affecting in its own right. For this we must thank Alfred Uhry, who adopted his own play, and Bruce Beresford, who directed with unostentatious finesse.

Miss Daisy, based on Uhry's grandmother, is a retired Jewish school-teacher in Atlanta. Though she once knew hard times, now, thanks to the prosperity of the family cotton will, currently run by her son, Boolie, she lieves in a grand house with a capable black housekeeper and a shiny new Packard. But she is 72 and wrecks her car; to drive her new Hudson, Boolie hires, very much against her wishes, a sixtyish black chauffeur, Hoke Colburn.

The film covers a quarter-century during which Hoke becomes ever more necessary to miss Daisy, who warms to him with excruciating slowness, her wariness and niggardliness flaring up again and again. Yet, with Boolie occasionally intervening, Miss Daisy and Hoke find their way to a prickly but mutually helpful relationship.

Daisy's problem is that she can't accept her affluence and remains stingy with both her possessions and her emotions. Hoke, who says he likes working for Jewish people (there is some solidarity between these beleaguered minorities), nevertheless has rough going of it with the crotchety crone: his pride is often trampled on, his patience stretched almost beyond endurance. But they make progress through funny little misadventures, lopsided fights (he curses under his breath), and starchy reconciliations. Daisy helps the dignified yet illiterate Hoke toward literacy, while his ironic complaisance and tactful suasion end p by humanizing her.

Ultimately, the movie is about Daisy's growing dependency and Hoke's increasing ascendance. As Jessica Tandy and Morgan Freeman play these two characters, they become infinitely rich in shading. Under her unyielding hauteur, Miss Daisy nevertheless suggests the need for Hoke's reasonableness and strength; underneath his good-humored compliance, Hoke cannot quite hide some irony and resentment. It is all there in his variously intoned "Yes'm" -- ranging from obligingness to tacit contempt, from sympathy to mild sarcasm--with which he responds to her genuine needs and absurd whims. Their mutual understanding evolves, yet for all her Jewishness and former penury, Miss Daisy cannot forget her image of herself as the white Southern lady, just as Hoke cannot forget that though he may be her superior in many ways, he cannot be her social equal.

It is not till long after Hoke has retired into rather easeful old age and Miss Daisy has been confined to an old folks' home and is on the threshold of death that the final epiphany occurs. Boolie takes Hoke along on a visit to his mother. Miss Daisy, frail and transparent as a paper flower, sends the by now greying and potbellied Boolie off "to charm the nurses," so she can be alone with Hoke, who helps her with her dinner, feeding her with spoonful by compassionate spoonful, his own hands less steady than when he used to drive her. Only then does the old woman admit that Hoke was her best friend. Even this scene, though, like all that preceded it, is directed as drily as possible; by not trying to break our hearts, it gently, sadly, humanely pervades our souls.

Driving Miss Daisy is a film made up mostly of very small incidents, many of them left unresolved except for the reverberations they set up in the characters and the audience. And although we see in the lieves of Daisy and Boolie the growing acceptance of Jews by the Old South, and the loves of Hoke and his unseen daughter the integration of blacks into white society, the film does not cheat. Miss Daisy and Hoke may form a somewhat comic alliance against real and imaginary ills, but it never becomes a true friendship.

There are some overimplications. Boolie's parvenue wife (Patti LuPone) is a bit too obviously crude; Idella, the housekeeper (Esther Rolle), is as tall, dignified, wise as Hoke (are there no imperfect blacks?); a black, hymn-singing funeral is a trifle too resplendently life-affirming; the racist comment of a highway patrolman about Miss Daisy and Hoke is a mite too pat. But these are minor matters, and may even be necessary guideposts for an audience that cannot live with too much subtlety. And in the acting of Tandy, Freeman, and, yets, Dan Aykroyd (Boolie), the film gets plenty of honesty, humor, and understated forcefulness. That sentiment does not slide into sentimentality is Bruce Beresford's discreet directorial contribution.