Baby Driver (2017)

Poor Edgar Wright – he’s made his first film since The World’s End in 2013, and all anyone wants to talk about is why he famously walked away from 2015’s Ant-Man. Never mind that Baby Driver is in a sense the anti-Ant-Man, a sharp, original, standalone action flick with nary an Avenger in sight (though Jon Bernthal, soon to grace Netflix in a Punisher series, does turn up for the film’s first heist), or that star Ansel Elgort is a kind of anti-Paul Rudd, terse-lipped and fairly fresh to audiences who sat out young-adult fare like The Fault in Our Stars or Divergent. For my money, Baby Driver is the anti-Fury Road, an automotive action film that gets the audience to care about the characters and their world without once repeating a trick from its arsenal amid a series of high-octane, motor-revving driving sequences.

Ansel Elgort stars as the eponymous Baby, a getaway driver in the employ of heist meister Doc (Kevin Spacey), who’s teeing up the trademark “one last job” for Baby. Baby has driven for bank robbers with the unlikely names of Buddy and Darling (Jon Hamm and Eiza González) and for manic muggers like Bats (Jamie Foxx), but his true passion is his music – piped through his iPod and a standout soundtrack – and his girl, waitress Debora (Lily James).

Baby Driver starts out with a bang-up bank robbery, the particulars of which are never seen; Wright instead focuses his cinematic eye on Baby grooving to his tunes and scoping out the landscape before throwing the car into gear and speeding away to the tune of “Bellbottoms” by the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion. It’s a clever approach to the scene, which most other directors would have set inside the bank, but Wright wisely takes this moment to introduce us to our protagonist, his methods and movements, before opening up his cinematic toolbox and showing us just what he can do with a barrage of edits, practical driving effects, and some first-rate sound design. It’s an opener that aligns us both with Baby and with Wright; having seen the ample capabilities of both, the audience is primed to care about what they do next.

Wright has always been a master of characterization; Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz created exceptionally memorable characters (aided, I grant you, by the superfluously talented Simon Pegg and Nick Frost), and even Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, though I didn’t much care for it, had a cast of strange rangers that I’ve had difficulty forgetting altogether. The good work continues in Baby Driver, with each “debut” giving us a very clear sense of who the character is and how they’ll fit into the larger world of the story. The exception, though, is Debora, who’s put into a kind of trope role of the pretty love interest until she takes a more active role in the film’s third act; I’d love to see Wright make a film that passes the Bechdel Test, for one, because it’s just about the only thing missing from Baby Driver.

One thing that isn’t lacking in Baby Driver is surprise and the visceral charge that goes with it. The screenplay takes a few unexpected turns, such that my plot summary above only scratches the surface of the places Baby Driver goes. Like the sharpest scripts, Baby Driver winds its pieces back together at the end in surprising ways, resurrecting plot elements long forgotten in order to throw the conclusion into sharper relief, and as we might have come to expect from Wright, lines of dialogue recur and accrue meaning, even if it’s just a sly wink to the audience as characters catch up to the references.

I watch a lot of movies; I tend to like a good deal of them, and I’m perhaps too forgiving of ones too close to my heart. As much as I loved Guardians, Vol. 2 and Wonder Woman, Baby Driver is probably the first must-see movie of the summer by sheer dint of its originality; a superhero movie is almost always kin to every other superhero movie, but Baby Driver feels fresher by being unfettered of any genre conventions. Like La La Land, which toyed with the conventions of a musical romance but never allied fully with that genre, Baby Driver orbits the heist/crime film but inflects it with all sorts of other things for a unique and exhilarating experience. The true mark of a film’s success is the reaction it provokes in an audience, and Baby Driver had me gasping, chuckling, and breathless.

Baby Driver is rated R for “violence and language throughout.” Written and directed by Edgar Wright. Starring Ansel Elgort, Lily James, Jamie Foxx, Jon Hamm, Eiza González, and Kevin Spacey.

The Fault in Our Stars (2014)

The Fault in Our Stars is the latest film adaptation of a wildly popular young adult novel, and while that all may sound tiresome, Josh Boone’s adaptation of John Green’s text thankfully departs from what you’re expecting both by avoiding the impulse to franchise and by crafting itself eloquently and movingly.

Hazel Grace Lancaster (Shailene Woodley), whose thyroid cancer has settled into her lungs, falls in love with fellow support group attendee Augustus Waters (Ansel Elgort), a one-legged survivor of osteosarcoma.  The two fall in love “the way you fall asleep – slowly, then all at once” and bond over Hazel’s favorite novel, An Imperial Affliction.  Soon, they travel with Hazel’s mother (Laura Dern) to Amsterdam to meet the author, Peter van Houten (Willem Dafoe).

What most people will have heard about the film is that it is an unabashed tearjerker.  It is, in fact, the weepiest film since About Time.  The target audience is, apparently, young adults, but don’t be deceived by where the publishing house had slotted the book; the filmmakers are emotional snipers who take aim at the heartstrings of anyone in the audience.  And based on the screening I saw, I suspect that this is one of those “not a dry eye in the house” films.

The Fault in Our Stars is a film about teenagers with cancer, and in a sense a teary audience is a bit like fish in a barrel.  What sets Fault apart from the Lifetime movie-of-the-week version of this story is that the emotions the film engenders really do feel earned.  This is something to which I’ve given a lot of thought – why does a film like this work so well when we’re (or at least, I am) immediately aware that we’re about to be manipulated emotionally?  Part of this, I think, has to do with the way the film frames itself; Hazel tells us repeatedly that hers is the only accurate story about cancer (An Imperial Affliction aside), which sets us on her side quite instantaneously, especially because the entire film is told from her perspective.

The bigger reason that Fault works, ultimately, is that it’s very well told.  Rather than rely on the “kids with cancer” crutch, Boone gives us a pair of very engaging star-crossed lovers in Woodley and Elgort.  Woodley’s gotten a fair bit of press for headlining the Divergent series (though critics seemed less enamored of it), but I do hope that this right here is a star-making performance (gosh, how many “star” puns can I come up with?) because Woodley is for a book reader a definitive Hazel Grace.  She captures all the snarky charm Green gave her, but she’s able to switch on the audience’s waterworks with a well-placed choke in her voice.

To be honest, I did have my reservations about Elgort.  I’d never seen him before, and Augustus Waters is a very difficult character to get just right.  His dialogue can come off as stilted, though this is entirely the point, but Elgort sells lines like “I reject that out of hand” by giving us an Augustus perfectly in line with Hazel’s assessment of him at a picnic near the film’s end.  He’s charming, and the audience falls in love with him when Hazel does.

The nice treat in the film is Willem Dafoe’s turn as the disaffected writer for whom Hazel and Augustus share a fondness.  (He’s also a welcome inclusion for parents or significant others who feel dragged to the film, but that’s neither here nor there.)  Now, Hazel and Augustus travel halfway across the world to meet him in what feels very much like the center of the film, though it’s a scene that doesn’t behave exactly like you would expect.  I’ll try not to spoil things – though I suspect that the kind of people who care about spoilers have already read the book – but putting this scene squarely in the middle of the narrative tells us something important about what I think Green’s endgame is.  Ultimately, I think the film speaks to Louis CK’s line about death; he says, “Lots of things happen after you die—they just don’t involve you.”  Van Houten is one of those things; Laura Dern’s role as the mother is another.  Now, again, this isn’t spoiling anything, but the film is such a heavy meditation on death (“oblivion is inevitable”) that I think it offers something equally poignant about what is left behind – about living in the face of death.

The obvious counter to the threat of death is the promise of memory, and the film is able to end optimistically because of that note.  I think that audiences too will remember this film in a way that we don’t necessarily remember bigger, bloatier franchised young-adult books-to-films like Twilight or The Hunger Games.  Self-contained and infinitely compassionate, The Fault in Our Stars is a fine change of pace from the big blockbuster films of the summer, so pack a tissue or two.

Okay?

The Fault in Our Stars is rated PG-13 for “thematic elements, some sexuality and brief strong language.”  As a movie about teens with cancer, the feels are at eleven, and these “thematic elements” will make you cry.  There’s heavy contemplation about death and the scars cancer leaves behind; the film has a very cheer-worthy F-bomb.  There are two make-out scenes, one played for laughs and the other a very intimate encounter in which clothing is removed but nothing is exposed.