What a treat Edgar Wright’s films are. His movies are solid testaments to the enduring beauty of cinema and impressive exercises of formal expertise. His filmmaking is so precise and kinetic, it’s seemingly a miracle that they also manage to be so funny. His latest film, Baby Driver, is only the second feature that Wright has written without comic actor Simon Pegg (the other was the adaptation of Scott Pilgrim vs. The World), and it’s fair to say that it is his most creatively independent endeavor, a piece free from narrative collaboration. Wright has spoken openly about spending decades trying to get this project off the ground, and the result is his American Technicolor Dream Film, arriving with great fanfare, for both Wright fans and fans of movies in general. What we get in Baby Driver is another one of Wright’s patented deep dives into the concept of genre. This time, it’s the American car chase film, a genre so ingrained into the era of New Hollywood – Hollywood’s most unabashedly uninhibited time – that Wright seemingly can’t help but stick it into a plot that reinforces the rigidity of that era’s narrative storytelling.
The movie stars Ansel Elgort as the titular Baby, a tinnitus-ridden getaway driver working for a shrewd, shaddowy Atlanta kingpin named Doc (Kevin Spacey). Baby has been Doc’s preferred driver since a much younger Baby stole Doc’s car (which held a large amount of Doc’s cash) and ditched it. Baby works off his debt in driving jobs, helping various gangs pull off bank heists and other high-scale robberies. Doc doesn’t like to work with the same crew twice, so Baby gets to meet a wide array of undesirables, including Buddy (Jon Hamm), a former business suit turned criminal drug addict, Buddy’s wife Darling (Eiza González) who shares Buddy’s taste for violence and cocaine, and also Bats (Jamie Foxx), a homicidal gunslinger who seems much more interested in the bloody carnage than the monetary reward of robbery. Baby is ready to be free of Doc’s debt, preferring a life of taking care of his deaf foster father Joseph (CJ Jones) and spending time with a waitress named Debora (Lily James) with whom he may be falling in love. As you might predict, escaping Doc’s grasp proves very hard to execute.
Baby’s tinnitus stems from a car accident from when he was a child. The accident killed both of his parents, left him with Joseph, and seemingly pushed him toward a wayward life that proved lucrative. The only way to stem the constant ringing in his ears is to listen to one of his several iPods, and so his existence is one of perpetual pop music, a non-stop, era-resistant top 40 radio station with no commercials. He lives more in his music than he does in the actual world. He records all of his conversations, not to procure information, but so he can then cut them up and remix them into their proper music context. It’s his ideal way of looking at the world. His life is such a redundant pattern of songs, he is caught completely unaware by his connection with Debora, who waits at the 50’s-themed diner his mother used to work at. Debora is a person he can talk to, and more importantly, she is able to pierce through his Phil Spector-sized Wall of Sound, and convince him that there’s more to life than driving the bad guys home.
Wright is having a lot of fun with this film, and so is his cast. Hamm, Spacey and Foxx, playing a clever game of musical chairs as the film’s resident “villain” are all great here, equal parts funny, intimidating and mercurial. The unfortunate truth is that Elgort is the film’s least interesting performance. Wright purposely strips the character of Baby down to the simplest motivations, and allows the other, more demonstrative characters to project onto him, but even with that little responsibility, Elgort failed to get much of a response out of me. Consider Ryan Gosling in Drive, in which Gosling played a character who was even more bereft of fundamental personality traits, and how that character (even more anonymously called ‘Driver’) has a much more fascinating screen presence. It’s hard not to think of Nicholas Winding Refn’s Drive while watching Baby Driver. Both films take completely different paths to tell the same story. While Wright is deconstructing screenwriting archetypes to weave a tale of American pop culture, Refn’s film was achingly sincere. It’s a lesson in how important a director is in how a story is told, with Refn choosing a synth-heavy tale of brutality and Wright using a Jacque Demy-level color palette to give his film a flighty airiness.
It’s interesting to think about how Wright, a frequent practitioner of graphic violence in all his films, chooses to use it here. The violence is more plentiful in Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, but those films had a level of absurdity that neutered the blood and guts. The violence in Baby Driver has consequences. Characters meet tragic ends, and we’re left to actually care. This may be something as simple as not having Pegg as his writing partner, but this felt much more indicative to me of how Wright was documenting American culture. A culture constantly teetering on the edge between diner milkshakes and heads being taken off by automatic weapons. We truly fear Bats and Doc when they make threats upon Debora’s life, in a way that we did not fear the zombies in Shaun of the Dead. It’s an element of dramatic tension that did not exist before in Wright’s films, and it imbues Baby Driver with an edge that lifts the film outside of genre deconstruction and into a story all on its own.
Baby Driver‘s soundtrack is much closer to the film’s engine than any of the movie’s cars. The music is a greek chorus of Baby’s inner turmoil, which shows in its variety (this might be the only film soundtrack ever that will include both a song off of The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds as well as “Debra” by Beck) and endears the film with a rhythm that never settles. Wright’s level of precision here is so important. With cinematographer Bill Pope and editors Jonathan Amos and Paul Machliss, Wright pulls off the ultimate soundtrack film, each song playing into the next in a way that both protects the integrity of the narrative and the songs themselves. There’s a part of me that misses the sillier aspects of Wright’s earlier films and there are times when Baby Driver seems caught in a sort of no-man’s-land between the absurdity of those films and the chic formality of a movie like Drive, but this is probably one of the best directed films that I’ll see this year, and when it works, its certainly one of the most entertaining.
Written and Directed by Edgar Wright