Best Picture: #62
Original Release Date: December 13, 1989
Rating: PG
Runtime: 1 hour, 39 minutes
Director: Bruce Beresford
Quick Impressions:
Like Oliver!, the first cinematic obsession of my young childhood, Driving Miss Daisy is a Best Picture winner that people usually bring up so they can complain about how it’s not as good a film as the masterpiece that wasn’t nominated that year. The many virtues of Oliver! count for nothing to champions of 2001: A Space Odyssey. (Shh! 2001 probably should have been nominated, yes, but I like Oliver! better. If both were nominees, and I were an Academy member, I would vote for Oliver!, based on its own merits.)
Similarly, these days, hardly anybody ever talks about Driving Miss Daisy without also mentioning Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing. (Okay, that’s not true. Driving Miss Daisy also comes up in discussions of Green Book, but as the chronological distance between the present and Green Book’s Best Picture win increases, surely that will quiet down more and more. In the future, Green Book will probably only come up because of its similarities to Driving Miss Daisy “which should have lost to Do the Right Thing. PS Mahershala Ali!”)
When I first saw Driving Miss Daisy as a ten-year-old, I loved it. But unlike my stance in the Oliver! vs. 2001 discussion, in this case, I agree that Do the Right Thing is the superior film (if pressed to pick one). Of course, keep in mind that I inordinately love Do the Right Thing. When I taught my first summer course in grad school, a friend of mine recommended building an essay prompt around it. (I’d say Do the Right Thing was the best recommendation she ever gave me, but she also recommended my husband, so I’ll just compliment her good taste.)
When I used the film again the next summer, something astonishing happened. One student in the class was a huge Spike Lee fan and had the most surprising insights about Do the Right Thing. Our class discussion that day quickly evolved into “Cameron makes Sarah’s brain explode as he opens her eyes to the genius of Spike Lee.” (That was such a great class, the same one in which another student gave me that fantastic Hindu “Sunday School” lesson I mentioned in my Gandhi review. He also recommended The Legend of Bhagat Singh which we later watched in part. I’ve never learned so much from “teaching” a class.)
After such a fruitful discussion (if you can call it that; my contribution was mostly gasping, “Wow!”), I watched Do the Right Thing through different eyes, and I began to love the movie so much. I used it in every rhetoric class I taught after that. It’s wonderful for teaching, especially because it pairs so perfectly with any number of other films to create thought-provoking assignments. Every time you pair it with another film, it becomes a different movie itself as you watch it. Granted, you can pair any two movies you want. (In fact, a disproportionate number of my assignments were about pairing movies. Someone could reasonably have complained, “If this is a rhetoric class, why are all of your assignments about reflecting on paired films?” and my response would have been, “Let me explain by showing you these two films.”) But Do the Right Thing particularly lends itself to this type of exercise. It somehow magically works as part of a double feature with anything and engenders the best type of verbal and written insights from students. It’s magical, a gift to rhetoric teachers. I paired it with Gone Baby, Gone and Good Night and Good Luck. And, for obvious reasons, I used it as part of an assignment that incorporated Malcolm X’s “The Ballot or the Bullet,” Martin Luther King’s “Nobel Lecture” and the book The Blind Side (which was required by the department that semester.)
So I’ve devoted a lot of mental energy to Do the Right Thing. I used to watch with the sound down, focused on the visuals, constantly revising my discussion questions. Then I listened without looking, to concentrate on the sound. Only a masterpiece would hold up to such scrutiny. I’m not sure Driving Miss Daisy would withstand the same kind of intense watching or lend itself to so many varied classroom activities and writing assignments. (Granted I have never tried to use it that way.)
That said, I’m writing here about Driving Miss Daisy, also a very good movie, adapted from a Pulitzer Prize winning play. I’ll acknowledge that Do the Right Thing may be the superior film. (It is certainly good for encouraging students to talk.) But as you read this, forget about Do the Right Thing for just a few minutes. Let’s focus instead on the strengths and weaknesses of the movie that actually did win Best Picture in 1989. (Though I can’t lie. I brought up Do the Right Thing to acknowledge and dismiss it, so I deliberately didn’t include any discussion of its plot or analysis showing what makes it great. But after remembering how much I love it, I’m now tempted to write a post inspired by the pairing of Do the Right Thing and Driving Miss Daisy. Maybe I will in the future. One thing at a time!)
Like Oliver!, Driving Miss Daisy is a deserving Best Picture winner that can stand on its own merits. It was adapted for the screen by Alfred Uhry (who won an Oscar for his efforts), from his own Pulitzer Prize winning play of the same name (the first play in his fairly well-known Atlanta Trilogy). Plus it won Jessica Tandy her first ever Oscar at the age of 80 (making her the oldest Best Actress winner, a record previously held by Katharine Hepburn). And perhaps most importantly of all (to me), the film began my years long obsession with the idea that Morgan Freeman deserved to win an Oscar.
The Good:
I first saw Driving Miss Daisy in the movie theater with my grandparents. After they took me to Turner and Hooch, then casually mentioned during the end credits that they would have watched the new James Bond movie if I hadn’t been along, I made a point of telling them, “Don’t worry about me. Next time, please pick the movie you want to see.” (They would not have wanted to see Do the Right Thing, but they did—incredulous that I would agree to it—take me to see The Hunt for Red October later that school year. It worked out much better for all of us when they picked the movies they wanted to see.)
I thoroughly enjoyed Driving Miss Daisy the first time, and so did my grandparents. It’s funny to think, given Jessica Tandy’s long career, that the kids I went to school with vaguely knew her as though she had just started existing in the 80s. Her meteoric rise into school playground consciousness late in her career reminds me of the way Agnes Moorehead suddenly became a household face and name because of Bewitched. Both actresses had long, distinguished careers, but when you play a witch on a popular TV show or interact with aliens (and then cute little robot aliens) in popular movies, suddenly everybody on the playground knows you. Even before her Oscar win for Driving Miss Daisy, both Cocoon and *batteries not included had made Jessica Tandy somewhat familiar to people my age who liked movies. (Watching Jeopardy! recently reminded me—by way of an incorrect Final Jeopardy! response—that Tandy actually originated the role of Blanche DuBois on Broadway, but people my age who recognized her knew her from *batteries not included.) I first remember seeing Tandy in The Birds, a film my sister and I were obsessed with as children. (We used to take turns trying to surprise each other to see if we could replicate the look of horror on Tippi Hedren’s face, which is a really weird game, now that I reflect on it.) My grandparents and I unanimously liked Tandy’s performance in Driving Miss Daisy. When she won Best Actress, we were happy for her.
But the performance that stood out for me was Morgan Freeman’s. I liked the way he played Hoke. To me (with my whopping ten years of wisdom), Hoke seemed like the more difficult role of the two. The character is very sympathetic, but he has such complexity. Hoke must go out of his way not to offend, and yet he’s often treated like a child when, in fact, he has the insights and experience of an adult.
On my first viewing, that made such an impression on me. I actually was a child, yet I still resented being discounted as one. I imagined that such treatment must have been much more frustrating for an actual adult. As a child, you think, “When I’m grown up, you’ll see.” A patronized adult must be thinking, “I am grown up, but you’ll never see.” Hoke could resent his situation so bitterly. He could focus on the resentment, letting it fester and determine his course of action. Instead, he develops sympathy for Daisy and finds ways to get through to her, choosing to be the bigger person even though others constantly try to diminish and infantilize him. He doesn’t just know he’s the bigger person; he behaves like the bigger person. That scene about knowing when he needs to “make water” made an indelible mark on my young mind. (This movie is sometimes criticized for being a little on the nose, but I was ten, so I liked the way it made its points clearly.) (Honestly, the scene probably resonated with me so much because Miss Daisy and Hoke’s dynamic reminded me strongly of my grandma and grandpa’s relationship. She was whimsical and demanding, yet she depended on him to take care of her, and he knew that.)
When Morgan Freeman didn’t win an Oscar, I was mad. (My level of outrage seems so funny now. I was a couple of weeks away from being eleven. I hadn’t even seen My Left Foot. My outrage was not very well informed, but it was so intense.) Then I saw Glory and liked Morgan Freeman’s performance even better than Denzel Washington’s (also excellent Best Supporting Actor winning turn). So for the rest of the 90s, I was on a crusade, somehow hoping to win Morgan Freeman an Oscar through the sheer power of my outrage every time he didn’t win. (The Shawshank Redemption was particularly torturous. And then somehow, I found a way to blame poor Tom Cruise for everything. When he was nominated the next year for Jerry McGuire and didn’t win, I remember yelling at the TV, “Well Morgan Freeman never wins either!” It makes me laugh now because those things have nothing to do with each other!) For the most part, I’m not sure I liked Million Dollar Baby, but I loved the fact that Morgan Freeman won an Oscar for his performance in it! (I was grown up by then, but still reacted with a dramatic, “Well finally!”)
As an adult, I see Driving Miss Daisy differently. After years of hearing people bash it for the sin of winning Best Picture instead of a film that was not nominated (which has all the logic of teenage me blaming Tom Cruise for Morgan Freeman never winning an Oscar), I went in this time thinking, “Well, this movie may be a little simplistic.” It’s really not.
If anything, Driving Miss Daisy is more complex than I noticed as a child. I even see a certain deftness in the way it addresses racial issues because it’s not just a movie where Miss Daisy and Hoke are in conversation. There’s a third party in the conversation, too, the audience. Driving Miss Daisy certainly made my grandparents ask themselves more questions about race than Do the Right Thing did because they watched Driving Miss Daisy. (I don’t think they’d even heard of Do the Right Thing.) To be most effective, the movie has to approach the audience (in 1989) in the way that Hoke approaches Daisy. It has to be mostly pleasant with just enough harsh reality mixed in to offer food for thought.
There’s something to be said for the “Everything’s so funny! What a kooky lady! Oh no, what a mishap! What a zany misunderstanding! Uh oh, they bombed the Temple. Wait that really happened? I have no idea who would do that. Oh yes, you do; you do know. Now here’s a horrible story about another act of racial violence. How could those things possibly be related? I have no idea. Oh yes, you do; you know. Now listen. Here are some words actually spoken by Martin Luther King. Did you like him enough to listen to his words at the time? Well, you’ve heard them now. Surprise!” approach.
There’s real merit in reaching out to (perhaps reluctant) audiences in this way. And the movie makes a pointed connection between violence against African Americans and violence against Jewish Americans that Spike Lee himself emphasizes in BlacKkKlansman (another film I really like). (It’s far too easy to say, “Of course I don’t like what they’re doing to those people, but what does that have to do with me?” To them, you are those people. Hate groups hate everyone! When you don’t stand up against hate, you’re hurting yourself, not just in the sense that you’re damaging your soul and becoming complicit in racial violence by doing nothing to stop it, but in the more literal sense that if they’re coming for “them,” they will come for you, too, eventually.)
Daisy (though she protests repeatedly that she is not prejudiced) initially does feel a separation between herself and Hoke. She gets along with her housekeeper Idella (Esther Rolle) because they have an understanding—Idella stays out of her way, knows her place, and puts up with her whimsically imperious demands. Daisy’s “What’s that got to do with me?” approach to racism is probably similar to the way many audience members (perhaps neither Jewish nor black) experience the film. When Hoke tells Daisy his awful personal experience in the wake of the Temple bombing, she asks in torment why he would tell her. She persists there’s no connection between the two events (though she knows there is). Audiences who lived through the era in which the film is set might feel more comfortable not hearing about such things either, insisting such matters have nothing to do with them. But the movie insists on bringing such things to their attention anyway.
One thing I like about this film is the way it uses comedy to highlight horrific things. When Daisy first has her car in the wrong gear and gets into a hilarious wreck, my daughter laughed appreciatively. The scene seems silly, zany, light. (The score and the cinematography highlight this.) But is it funny, really? She’s an old woman who lives alone. Without a car, she must rely more and more on her son or on friends to come to her. She loses so much agency. Her life becomes so small. She’s so helpless, really. (Again and again, Daisy protests that she doesn’t need servants. Her family has always done hard work to take care of themselves. But she does need them. She’s getting older, and she needs help.)
Later when she prepares to accuse Hoke of stealing a (33 cent) can of salmon from her panty, the whole scene is played up for comedy to a ridiculous degree (again we get musical and cinematic cues, and this time they’re totally over the top, so we can’t miss the point that this is all ludicrous). At first I thought, “Yes, yes, Daisy is being ridiculous here,” and then I went on to think sarcastically, “Because what’s funnier than an African American man in the 1950s South being frivolously accused of a crime he didn’t commit? The fallout from that is always just terribly hilarious!” (Being proven wrong was a brief embarrassment to Daisy. Had the episode had turned out differently, Hoke would have experienced more than loss of face.)
With scenes like these, Driving Miss Daisy asks us to look a little closer at our familiar world. Yes, stuff like this is funny on sitcoms. But in real life, the consequences to such moments can be tragic. If you choose to look only at the ridiculous side (without giving a single thought to the tragic consequences), then you’re not thinking about real life. You’re living in a reality that’s as carefully constructed as a sitcom. That’s the reason well meaning people like my grandparents were slow to understand the work of people like Martin Luther King. As they lived the events, they were focused on a carefully constructed reality, a certain point of view. They didn’t adopt that viewpoint maliciously. They were just going about their lives, like Daisy, getting bogged down in the details, the comfortable routine. It’s always enlightening to learn someone else’s view of (seemingly) familiar events.
My daughter had what I think is a great insight (especially since when I was her age, my big insight was, “I love Morgan Freeman! Why is everyone so obsessed with Tom Cruise!!!!!!!?”) As the movie opened, she snickered a bit at the house’s décor and the movie’s persistence in showing us all the pictures of flowers. “Oh my God, this woman loves her flowers!” she said. “There’s like seven pictures of flowers, wallpaper full of flowers, floral rugs…” Mid-way through the film, she asked, “Wait! Is her name really Daisy? And she lives in a house full of flowers?” Then she started to think.
“At first,” she noted, “I thought it was comical and stupid the way we got so many shots of the house and all the flowers, but now I see it’s symbolic. Over the years, the house is wearing down, just like she’s aging. The house ages with her. Also, the house is big and fancy and appears like a rich person house on the outside, but on the inside, it’s nothing fancy. It’s just her house, her kitchen, her bedroom. It’s not as complex as it wants you to think it is. And that’s the way she is, too. Her house appears glamorous, but inside, it’s just her. There’s really nothing more to it.”
Her insight about the house’s similarity to the protagonist made me think about how the movie uses visual and sound cues to create humor, and humor, in turn, to stress the disconnect between people’s carefully constructed, perceived worlds and the somewhat more brutal realities concealed by those comforting structures.
Both Tandy and Freeman give Oscar worthy performances here. The film is making its point in a very careful, particular way, and the wrong actors in the roles would ruin it. Their performances have to contain the same hidden complexities the script does. (I’ve often heard the movie described as overly simplistic, and I find the opposite to be true, honestly. I think some of its more subtle touches are easily missed.)
My past experiences in the classroom have made one thing clear to me. Racism is easier to discuss in a classroom environment because then you’re examining well written texts, looking at cogent arguments in isolation. But when you bring the same kinds of ideas into your Aunt Sally’s living room, suddenly everything gets a lot more complicated. You can read transcripts of speeches by Malcolm X and Martin Luther King and follow their arguments and see injustices they mention very clearly in a classroom. But when you think about your family’s own past, everything gets muddled. When you start introducing ideas that conflict with the norms you’ve grown up with in your own life, an element of confusion emerges. Daisy can’t see any connection between racial violence and her own life because all she does is go through each mundane day, just as she always has. The familiar clutter of her daily life stands in the way of her reception of new ideas. Spending so much time in the car with Hoke probably helps her see things more clearly. There’s less clutter in the car. The house is full of the accumulated, comfortable familiar. In the car, it’s just the two of them going on a journey together.
Daisy is a fantastic character for illustrating another point, too. My daughter kept making fun of her long speeches about how she wasn’t rich because once she had been poor. (She said, “Her reasoning is so silly. She’s like, “Did you know—once I was a baby, and therefore I’m still a baby even though I’m 64!’”) That is a silly way to think. But it’s also incredibly common. (How often have you heard someone argue that minorities could not possibly be experiencing extra adversity because the speaker himself has worked hard all his life and encountered hardship, too? If you haven’t heard this every single day from at least one person on social media, then lucky you.) I’m sure thoughts like this must have resonated with my grandparents who worked hard to live through the Great Depression. Hard work is commendable, but one person’s suffering doesn’t negate the suffering of someone else. It can be hard to realize that sometimes.
I know some people don’t like the movie because it makes racism in the South look like it can be resolved with a series of increasingly pleasant conversations. But again, that Temple bombing in Atlanta really happened, and when Miss Daisy listens to Martin Luther King speak, it’s his own voice from archive footage. How many people (especially white people my grandparents’ age) interested in pleasant comedies would have sought out material about the Temple bombing? But if they watch Driving Miss Daisy, they’ve now encountered that material even if they didn’t want to, and they’re forced to engage with it.
As an adult, I see greater strength and nuance in Tandy’s performance than I appreciated as a child. Daisy’s a woman who resents having servants, who does not want to be served. And yet she needs help. She’s set in her ways, but those ways are not really working. Only very late in the film does Daisy begin to realize the need for societal change and that people like her must work to effect it. Then she begins to lose her mental sharpness and succumb to old age. I find this a brilliant (and compassionate) illustration of why societal change is so slow. The film illustrates the point it quotes Martin Luther King as making. Sometimes people who do not have ill intent are too slow to understand the extent of the problem and that they need to work to change it. (Daisy begins to appreciate this very late in her life. My grandparents, watching the movie, were getting this message pretty late, too. But on the bright side, they did bring ten-year-old me to the movie theater with them.)
Best Scene:
The moment in the car when the Temple bombing prompts Hoke to share his story is pretty pointed, but still one of the strongest scenes in the film. I’m also still pretty fond of Hoke’s decision to get out of the car when he needs to relieve himself. He makes an excellent point, and she’s so frightened without him.
Best Scene Visually:
It’s hard to forget the ironic image of Daisy sitting in a ballroom, watching Martin Luther King speak about the “appalling silence and indifference” of people who should be helping while Hoke sits outside listening to the speech on the radio in the car. Tandy lets us see Daisy’s growing discomfort. Listening to Dr. King’s words, she realizes that she probably should have invited Hoke to come to the speech with her. (She already knew that based on their confrontation outside, but the speech really drives the point home.)
I also like the look of the scene at the cemetery (and, of course, that moment is very touching, my daughter’s favorite part of the movie).
Best Action Sequence:
My choice here will probably be surprising, but on this watch, I was really struck by the film’s final scene, when Hoke feeds Miss Daisy her Thanksgiving pie. My daughter and I joked about this quite a bit.
“I don’t like the idea of being old,” she said.
Then I realized, “I don’t like the idea of being fed pie.” To entertain her, I went on, “Look at her. She makes so many faces of delight. She probably won an Oscar just for eating this pie. There are so many bites left! I would run out of faces! Then the other person would be like, ‘Don’t you like it when I feed you pie?’”
Incredulously, my daughter croaked, “That’s what you worry about about old age?”
“Yeah,” I said and went on, “I mean, what if she left the pie because she didn’t want to eat it in the first place? That’s such a big piece of pie!”
The longer I talked, the more I realized I wasn’t joking. Watching Hoke feed Miss Daisy that pie made me deeply uncomfortable. And I think that’s important.
Imagine feeding someone an entire piece of pie, bite by bite. Imagine being fed an entire piece of pie. That’s a deeply intimate activity. Good friends or lovers might occasionally feed each other—but probably not an entire piece of pie, bite by bite! That’s the way you feed someone who cannot eat. You feed your baby that way, or your elderly parent. And it’s uncomfortable to eat that way unless you completely trust the person feeding you.
My daughter would not let anybody but me “feed her the um mum” as we called the ritual of sitting in her highchair and eating baby food when she was about ten months old. For a very long time, if somebody other than me offered her a spoon of baby food, she would refuse to open her mouth. And then, finally, when she warmed up to Daddy or Grandma feeding her, she still wouldn’t open up unless they enthusiastically said, “Mmm! Um mum!” and other various yummy noises like I did. Furthermore, she would herself make these noises after eating every bite. And we’d make a bunch of faces at each other, too. (Eventually, she got tricky and made the yummiest noises when pretending to eat food she secretly spit out or hid.)
In this final scene together, Hoke and Daisy have reached a place not just of love, but of complete trust and mutual respect. He has always served her, but at first he did it because he needed the job. Now he’s doing it because he cares for her. She did not always let him serve her. Initially, she rejected him outright. And he kept intruding in ways she didn’t want. She didn’t want him dusting her light bulbs or touching the flowers in her garden. Gradually she warmed to him, but she still kept a bit of distance and retained the right to be whimsically imperious when she felt her boundaries were being violated. But now, after years of growing to understand each other, she’s letting him hand feed her, and she’s reacting to every bite. That is not necessary for digestion. Jessica Tandy accepts a bite of that pie, and as she slowly chews it, she looks like she’s having a religious experience. It could be a pie commercial. I’m sure the pie is tasty and all, but that expression of transcendent joy has got to be for Hoke. She wants to show him that she values what he does for her. And he feeds her each bite at the rate which she wants to accept it. He does not insist.
The pie scene shows that they’ve come a long way. That they’re sitting together at a Thanksgiving table is probably significant, too.
As a child, the scene just before this with the lost papers made a huge impression on me, too. (It’s hard not to wonder if the guilt and distress she feels is not really about losing the papers.)
The Negatives:
My daughter could not stand Dan Ackroyd’s performance in this movie. (“Why is he always yelling? What is going on with his accent?”) She found his accent too exaggerated and his voice too loud, sometimes almost atonal. I also had a good friend in grad school who routinely expressed his disbelief that Ackroyd was nominated for an Oscar for his performance as Boolie. I’m less bothered because Boolie is supposed to be a frustrating character, I think, so it makes sense that Ackroyd’s performance of him is sometimes grating. Basically, if all progress depends on the unreasonable man, Boolie is the reasonable man who lacks the resolve and the courage to effect any real change. Boolie sometimes comes across as a bit spineless, but I’m not convinced that he lets his wife walk all over him. Sometimes he seems to use her as a convenient excuse. (I mean, he married her voluntarily, after all.) The scene when he refuses to accompany his mother to the banquet shows that he’s less concerned about what his wife thinks than what the people he must do business with think. And that’s reasonable behavior, showing why societal progress is so slow. For most of the movie, Boolie behaves like the more sensible, tolerant one, and his mother seems capricious and exasperating. But she demonstrates that she can change. Boolie seems pretty static. Of the main performances in the film, Ackroyd’s is probably the weakest, but he’s also playing a somewhat exasperating character. (Boolie is particularly exasperating because he does have so many good qualities, and he often does good things.)
The only other issue I have with the movie is that it’s a little short. (We would have loved a little more Esther Rolle. My daughter was so distressed when Idella died!) Instead of a turn with the Temple bombing leading to a gradual change in Daisy, the next thing we know, the movie is practically over. Of course, people do get old. Life is precarious like that. We could die at any time.
The other obvious thing to criticize is something I liked when I was younger. Hoke is just so nice and agreeable. But he does feel and express exasperation at his situation (and at Miss Daisy) quite a lot. One thing I do like is that throughout the film, Hoke keeps saying things like, “I just don’t understand!” Her attitudes and behaviors are so perplexing (and frustrating) to him. But then instead of simply remaining angry, he tries to understand. As he learns to see what motivates Daisy, why she thinks and behaves the way she does, he also learns a more effective way of interacting with her, one that is beneficial to both of them. I don’t think that the movie intends to disguise the fact that the period was not pleasant. Hoke isn’t complacent and cheerful about his situation. He’s not just having the time of his life driving that car. He’s incredibly frustrated but trying to thrive anyway. I think that some of the harshest readings of this film (perhaps deliberately) overlook the nuance present in the performances and the story.
Overall:
I enjoyed watching Driving Miss Daisy again. Both Jessica Tandy and Morgan Freeman give excellent performances as thought-provoking characters. The film makes its audience aware of issues very gently, but it does not deny the seriousness and disturbing nature of those societal problems. I wish it were a little longer, maybe just because I enjoy the escapism of road trips.