A featured selection at the 2006 Tribeca Film Festival, Driving Lessons is a decently touching, passingly amusing and laid-track heart-warming little look at a young guy’s coming-of-age, starring
Rupert Grint, of the Harry Potter
films, and further anchored by respected Academy Award nominees Laura Linney and
Julie Walters. If it’s by and by a quite familiar tale, it’s earnestly acted, and one that at least offers
Grint the opportunity to stretch his legs a little bit, which should be
welcomed by fans of the aforementioned series.
We first meet Ben, a shy, bookish 17-year-old, as he’s approaching
a very unpromising summer vacation. While the other kids are out having fun,
Ben spends these precious few weeks attending bible classes, suffering the
titular instruction with his overbearing and self-righteous mother (Linney) and
helping out at a local old people’s home. It’s certainly not his ideal
summer break but, with a demanding, vigilant mother and a passive vicar for a
father (Nicholas Farrell), Ben is anything but in control of his own destiny;
he’s marking time, caught up between adolescence and adulthood.
he gets a job assisting Evie (Walters, Grint’s mother in the Potter flicks), an eccentric retired actress. Refined,
vulgar and childish all at once, Evie enters Ben’s life like a hurricane.
Suddenly caught up between these two very different storm fronts, Ben starts to
gravitate more and more towards his employer’s unconventional and often bizarre
ways, even though it continually gets him into trouble with his mother. Evie
drafts Ben as her partner in a series of adventures, culminating in a camping excursion
that turns into a full-fledged road trip when she cajoles unlicensed Ben into
driving her to the Edinburgh Festival. Ben reluctantly ignores his conformist
instincts and jumps behind the wheel. What follows is a journey in which Ben
and Evie help each other move forward in their radically different lives, as
Ben is forced to confront how he was brought up and who he ultimately wants to
be.
good bit of Driving Lessons on his
own childhood experiences, the movie trades in fairly familiar archetypes to
anyone who’s seen their fair share of repressed-Christian and/or otherwise stifled
adolescent tales of keenly pitched woe and awakening. For all her wild energy, Evie
is essentially just another manipulative force in Ben’s life, and it takes both
him and the movie a while to recognize and own up to this fact. Gangly Grint is
ample as Ben, and Linney and Walters hold serve on screen through the force of
their personalities, but the characters as written are rather thin, and the movie itself doesn’t fully engage so much as glide
smoothly through its conflicts, to its rather unsurprising final resting point.
Though not as harsh a judgment as it sounds, Driving Lessons is essentially a whiler of time, engaging but not
necessarily remarkable.
anamorphic widescreen transfer, the film comes with a Dolby digital 5.1
soundtrack which acquits itself nicely, and optional English and French
subtitles. Supplemental special features consist of a perfunctory 17-minute making-of
featurette, which includes on-set footage and interviews. There is also a quartet
of deleted scenes and a very short blooper reel, complemented by trailers for
other Sony arthouse and indie-inflected releases. C (Movie) B- (Disc)