"Driving Miss Daisy" is a classic example of a supposedly anti-racist film that itself is racially oblivious--a feel-good flick for white audiences to feel good about themselves for supposedly, like Jessica Tandy's titular character, having "never been prejudiced." It was so successful at this that Hollywood patted themselves on the backs for being likewise liberal minded and awarded this lousy excuse for cinema the Oscar for Best Picture. Meanwhile, they notoriously failed to even nominate "Do the Right Thing" (1989), or any other film that might challenge their attitudes about race, for Best Picture. Moreover, "Driving Miss Daisy" is exemplary of a filmed play: despite all of the traveling, it's essentially trapped within the sets of Miss Daisy's home and her cars; very little is done to open it up from its theatrical origins, and devoid of almost anything beyond the bare necessities that is essentially cinematic, it's full of talking and more talking.
In it, Morgan Freeman provides an archetype for the stock character of the Magical Negro--a variation on the long-standing Tom type: a white fantasy of a subservient black man with essentially no life outside of aiding the white protagonist and other white characters through their dramatic dilemmas. Even before driving Miss Daisy around for the rest of the proceedings, Freeman's Hoke, immediately upon entering the screen, helps Miss Daisy's son, Mr. Werthan (Dan Aykroyd), with a malfunctioning elevator at his factory. From there, it's just one "yessuh" after another as he drives the cantankerous Miss Daisy around Atlanta (along with a brief sojourn to Alabama), intermittently offering Miss Daisy some pearls of wisdom, which results in her eventually, through their elderly years from the late 1940s to early 1970s, treating him with some respect and friendship. Even when Hoke is shown talking alone with other black servants, Freeman never drops the slavish speech--another oblivious white writer's illusion that black servants, in the Jim Crow South, would speak much the same with each other as they do to their white employers.
Even though Miss Daisy and her son bond with Hoke, she still goes from trying to deny him from pulling over to urinate during a long car ride despite segregation preventing him from being allowed to use the toilet of the gas station at the previous stop and, later, thinks nothing of not inviting him to a speech by Martin Luther King--because, after all, she claims he must already know King and have every other opportunity to see him. Meanwhile, Mr. Werthan is plenty polite to Hoke, but he's not going to risk losing business with racists by attending anything having to do with the civil-rights leader or even put up much of a fuss if his mother or wife want to persecute their servants.
Regardless, that none of the white characters are without prejudice isn't the true fault here; it's that the rest of the picture is just as prejudiced and masks it with a veneer of anti-racist liberalism. Even then, though, it seems to obtusely approach racism against African Americans through the prism of anti-Semitism. There are the racist cops who intimidate Hoke, but they're also disrespectful, albeit less so, to the Jewish Miss Daisy. The bombing of a synagogue is covered and, yet, Hoke is never quite able to reconcile with Miss Daisy on its connection with lynching, let alone the later black Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham that the film never mentions--along with omitting almost everything else involving segregation and the Civil Rights movement in the South during the era. Boiling the Civil Rights movement down to a speech by King here makes "Forrest Gump" (1994) look as though it's an enlightening assemblage of American history by contrast.
All of this would be more tolerable, too, if the camera ever divined to leave the proscenium arch for a spell or the stage-bound theatrics of the chatter between Freeman and Tandy. Sure, they're fine-enough actors, I suppose, but I don't see what's so amusing about watching them and Aykroyd change makeup to appear ever and ever older for 100 minutes, but, yeah, kudos for making Freeman look like a perpetual geezer who's somehow aged a bit backwards if anything in real life. Additionally, the musical score is horrendously mawkish--egregiously contoured to affect emotions in the audience that the picture hasn't earned. In the end, "Driving Miss Daisy" is too simplistic, too, not to be transparently flawed and hypocritical: cinema without being cinematic, pretending anti-racism while being all-too-familiarly prejudiced.
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