"Driving Miss Daisy" is so quiet and genteel that it threatens to evaporate right off the screen.
The source material is well written and carries with it a certain poignancy and power, but one suspects that it carried even more power on stage. The impression left by the film is that director Bruce Beresford had trouble filling out the screen.
He does get nice performances from his actors, though, especially Jessica Tandy as the title character, a privileged white woman through whose unique perspective we see the gradual changes wrought by the civil rights movement. Morgan Freeman is her chauffeur, and he does the gentle sage routine that seemed fresh at the time because we hadn't yet realized that that's all he would do for the next twenty years. And Dan Aykroyd takes an uncharacteristic stroll through more dramatic terrain as Miss Daisy's son.
"Driving Miss Daisy" is a pleasant enough movie, but the fact that it won the 1989 Academy Award for Best Picture, more than emphasizing the quality of this particular film, points out the lack of quality of everything else that year.
Grade: B
The source material is well written and carries with it a certain poignancy and power, but one suspects that it carried even more power on stage. The impression left by the film is that director Bruce Beresford had trouble filling out the screen.
He does get nice performances from his actors, though, especially Jessica Tandy as the title character, a privileged white woman through whose unique perspective we see the gradual changes wrought by the civil rights movement. Morgan Freeman is her chauffeur, and he does the gentle sage routine that seemed fresh at the time because we hadn't yet realized that that's all he would do for the next twenty years. And Dan Aykroyd takes an uncharacteristic stroll through more dramatic terrain as Miss Daisy's son.
"Driving Miss Daisy" is a pleasant enough movie, but the fact that it won the 1989 Academy Award for Best Picture, more than emphasizing the quality of this particular film, points out the lack of quality of everything else that year.
Grade: B