bostanci-51769
This is not your typical fast paced, action filled, loud sound track, big budget movie. However, It will have a much more powerful impact.It's a story about a proud Southern Old lady - Miss Daisy Werthan - and a sage black chauffeur - Hoke Colburn -. You go through 25 years of changing social backdrop and an ever evolving story of their relationship. Movie is filled with subtle remarks and gestures, you will miss it if you focus on your popcorn. Director demands your attention so gently that you don't want to break his heart by not paying attention.At the end of the movie, you say to yourself :"I will miss these guys".
SimonJack
"Driving Miss Daisy" is a wonderful movie about a friendship that developed between an aging white widow and an aging black man in the South of the early to mid-20th century. Daisy Werthan is a cantankerous widow, a long-retired teacher, who lives in the family's large home with a black woman servant, Idella. She is wealthy but is frugal from her upbringing. The film makes it a point that she and her son, Boolie, are Jewish. Hoke Colburn is a genial uneducated black man, wise for his age and experience. After Daisy has an accident that totals her car, she can no longer drive. Boolie hires Hoke to be her driver. I missed this film when it came out in theaters; and looked forward to watching it on DVD.While the focus is on the two stars, played exceptionally well by Jessica Tandy and Morgan Freeman, the movie has a clear message and judgment of the people and place at the time. Racial segregation yet was the standard in the South, and the movement for ending the last shackles of slavery – segregation and discrimination – was just coming to life. Toward the end of the film, when she is nearing her 90th birthday, she attends a dinner at an antebellum estate or hall. The speaker is Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. While we don't see MLK, we hear part of his speech as the scene switches between Daisy and other people at dinner tables, and Hoke sitting alone in the car outside and listening to the talk on the radio. . But first, on the drive to the dinner, Daisy says to Hoke, "Boolie said you wanted to go with me to this dinner. Did you tell him that?" Hoke, "No, ma'am, I didn't." Daisy, "I didn't think so. What'd be the point? You can hear him whenever you want. I think it's wonderful the way things are changin'." After they arrive, they have an exchange and Hoke gets out of the car and says to himself, "Talk about things changin'. They ain't changed all that much."In the dining room, we see Daisy and the other dinner guests – white and black – looking off screen as MLK speaks. "Yet, there are in the white South, millions of people of good will whose voices are yet unheard, whose course is yet unclear, and whose courageous acts are yet unseen. These millions are called upon to gird their courage to speak out. To offer leadership that is needed. History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the vitriolic words and the violent actions of the bad people, but the appalling silence and indifference of the good people. Our generation will have to repent not only for the words and acts of the children of darkness but also for the fears and apathy of the children of light." (This speech by MLK Jr took place on January 2, 1965, in Atlanta, Georgia.)As Jews, Daisy and Boolie know a little about prejudice and injustice. The Holocaust of World War II was fresh in the public mind. Yet, their Jewishness doesn't appear to have hurt them in anyway. Boolie receives a man-of-the-year award in Atlanta. Yet, he worries that going to the MLK dinner could affect his business – some of which might move over to a Jew from New York. They both say they aren't prejudiced, and Boolie is very kind and respectful toward blacks. But, Daisy has grown up with prejudice that she doesn't recognize. When she finds that a can of salmon was missing, she suspects Hoke. She says, "that kind" can't be trusted. As the years pass, Daisy becomes more friendly with Hoke. But, at the dinner, as she listened to MLK speak, did Daisy ask herself if she had bothered to lift a finger to help end segregation? Or, had she been a part of the apathy and indifference?In the closing scene, Hoke and Boolie visit Daisy two years after she has moved to a retirement home. She sends Boolie off, so she and Hoke can talk. She tells Hoke, "You're my best friend." Hoke says, "Oh, look. You haven't eaten your Thanksgiving pie." Daisy smiles and fumbles for a spoon. Hoke says, "Here, let me help you." He offers a spoon of pie and she eats it slowly. Then another bite, and another, and the music plays as the film ends. That was a powerful scene to me. An uneducated black man of the South, gently spoon-feeding an aged wealthy, white woman of the South who, so slowly even in old age, came to change her ways.Jessica Tandy surely deserved her best actress Oscar. The movie won four Oscars in 1989, including best picture. Morgan Freeman surely was deserving of his best actor nomination. But, his competition was very strong, including great performances by Kenneth Branagh in "Henry V" and by the winner, Daniel Day-Lewis, in "My Left Foot." I enjoy Freeman in all his movies I've seen. He's so often cast as the president, or a senator, or an organization head in action and mystery films. It's good to see him in a film in which he more fully can use his wonderful acting skills. Dan Aykroyd is excellent as Boolie. The producers must have rented all the 1940s and 1950s vintage cars they could find for the various driving and street scenes. I wonder if a short scene toward the end was intended as a political dig. Boolie tells Daisy that his wife, Florine, is away at a function as "a Republican delegate." Indeed, the South was beginning to change.
Sergeant_Tibbs
Driving Miss Daisy lives foremost in Academy Award history infamy more than anything else, not necessarily because it beat anything particularly superior like the next year's Dances With Wolves, but because even for them it's just not up to their standards. Based on a play, and it should've stayed on the stage despite the freedom film gives to driving, it's really stale and bland. Quite backwards and overly simplistic especially among a field of more progressive films of its time. The quirky 'odd couple' relationship between an old lady and black man provides clichéd conflict and saccharine drama, touching on light racial themes as delicately as possible as to not disturb anyone. It has mildly amusing moments, nothing original in the slightest, just flukes where the charm clicks, though it ruins it with something eye rolling inducing shortly afterwards.It actually wouldn't be quite so bad if the ensemble wasn't so unbearable. I've never found Morgan Freeman this intolerable, from top to bottom he comes off as false and irritating. The only moments he's decent are the somber reflective ones, this tone he later took throughout the better part of his career, but otherwise it falls flat. Jessica Tandy is no help to him either being merely okay and Dan Akroyd always looks and feels out of place, one take away from anything natural. It has a clunky contrived rhythm about it that doesn't make anything believable. It's just a sentimental lifetime movie with no real justification of why we have to spend it with these insufferable characters. There's a reason Bruce Beresford wasn't nominated for Director or done anything worthwhile since, he has no vision, if only they realized it for the Picture lineup too. I'm just glad to have gotten it out of the way.5/10
