Filmmaker Edgar Wright delivers with Baby Driver
Summer movies are usually loud and obnoxious. They’re heavy on plot and special effects, low on characters and emotion. As always, summer features a variety of sequel and comic book movie fare for the casual moviegoer, the one who spends time in darkened theaters not because they love movies necessarily but because the skies are too gray for a trip to the pool and the kids are too wild to spend a day in the house.
There’s nothing wrong with that, of course. Movies can and should be used as an escape from any number of situations. But it does it get tiring when every week is a new cartoon sequel or franchise behemoth more interested in the opening weekend box office than telling an effective story. Sometimes, the heart wants more.
This week, Edgar Wright has given us that.
Wright, director of great comedies like Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, has created something very different in Baby Driver. His epically stylized heist/car/music film is something out of the ordinary for any time of year, let alone summer time squalor. The film is at once a classic, without a doubt the best film in Wright’s collection, and moreover, it’s a great time at the movies for just about anyone.
As I said, Baby Driver is a heist film, but told almost entirely from the perspective of a taciturn young wheel man named Baby (Ansel Elgort). Rarely seen without his sunglasses and ear buds, Baby has a unique style when running from a robbery—a highly eclectic musical taste that both informs and accompanies his decisions behind the wheel. Everything happens in time, perfectly choreographed to whatever he listens to during the caper.
We learn that Baby was in an accident when he was younger, leaving him with a bad case of tinnitus. He listens to music to drown out the perpetual ringing in his ears. We also learn that he was caught stealing a car from a crime boss named Doc (Kevin Spacey) sometime ago, costing the man a sizable score. Doc forces Baby to drive for his criminal enterprise until the debt is squared.
Over the course of the film, we see Baby lead the Atlanta police on thrilling chases through familiar territory with different crews until he meets a charming young waitress and decides he wants out. But as with most organized crime, it’s never that easy.
Much of the plot is boilerplate crime movie: criminal nicknames, elaborate plots, goofy masks, damsels in distress, silent heroes. But the plot isn’t the point in a film like Baby Driver. The point here is the stylistic choices of the director, more the way the story is told than that the story being told.
Without the flourishes that have become earmarks for Edgar Wright, the film would mostly fall flat. Instead, the seamless integration of the soundtrack into each scene, the beauty of hearing the pounding of a machine gun with the accents of a song, takes what would ordinarily be a standard film and elevates it to something else, something elegant and artful, something more fun than is conveyed through the trailers.
It’s also quite fun to see a film like this one set in Atlanta. While I’ve never lived there, I’ve visited a time or two (or a dozen) and seeing the action take place on corners and down streets that you know is pretty nifty—something New Yorkers or Los Angelenos likely take for granted.
It’s nice to see a major southern city featured in any Hollywood project—for a while now, there’s been a slow shift in film production, away from LA to states like Georgia, giving the studios tax breaks while boosting local economies. There’s no reason Tennessee can’t do the same, assuming short sighted representatives stop getting in the way.
But that’s a digression. Baby Driver is the best film I’ve seen so far this year—and the first one to genuinely surprise me at just how good it is. There’s no doubt that when Oscar season comes around, I’ll ask myself why it’s not on the list of Best Picture nominees. Then I’ll remember that it’s not serious enough and wonder why movies have to be serious at all. Baby Driver isn’t and the world is better for it.