'Baby Driver' a propulsive, original caper
Going into a new Edgar Wright film, for me, always comes with impossible expectations. The writer/director of “Shaun of the Dead,” “Hot Fuzz” and “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World” is one of my favorite visual filmmakers — his editing and camerawork muster as much humor as his rich, story and character-driven screenplays. He’s one of the only people out there bringing a high-class aesthetic to the comedy genre.
With “Baby Driver,” the director applies his uniquely kinetic sensibility to the action caper genre — specifically car chase movies, and for a Wright purist, the shift in tone is a bit jarring. While the movie injects a lot of humor and style into its criminal underworld universe, “Baby Driver” exists outside the absurdist, satiric universe of his prior movies. Even with a near constant soundtrack and its hyper-stylized dialogue, “Baby Driver” is Wright’s first movie objectively set in the real world.
In that respect, “Baby Driver” is probably Wright’s most accessible and mainstream feature, with a trio of exciting chase sequences that put the overblown CGI action in most every other blockbuster this year to shame.
Still, I spent the first 20 minutes of the movie wondering if I could let go of what I typically expect from an Edgar Wright experience. Rather than lovable schlub Simon Pegg (Wright’s screenwriting collaborator and star of three of his five films) as the lead, “Baby Driver” casts young heartthrob Ansel Elgort (“The Fault in Our Stars”) as the titular getaway driver, and at first Elgort’s blank handsomeness doesn’t seem to gel with the style Wright seems to be going for.
Suffering from tinnitus, Elgort’s Baby listens to music constantly to drown out the ringing in his ears, to the point where crooked co-conspirators don’t trust his attention span or skills behind the wheel. The opening scene of the movie finds Baby sitting in a running car, waiting outside a bank robbery, and listening and dancing to music on his iPod. Following an exciting escape, “Baby Driver” doubles down on the character’s musical roots with a title sequence where Baby dances and sings through the street.
Place Simon Pegg in those scenes and its obviously comedic. With Elgort, however, I wasn’t sure if the film was trying to force a cool swagger on a character (and actor) who hadn’t yet earned it.
As the film unspools, Wright’s choice in Elgort begins to make sense. Baby isn’t a criminal by choice — Kevin Spacey plays Doc, a smooth-talking-but-menacing kingpin who is forcing Baby behind the wheel. It’s Elgort’s seeming awkwardness and innocence that ultimately makes all the difference in how the character proceeds once his debt to Doc is lifted by the movie’s midpoint. Baby isn’t trying to be cool for anybody, unlike some of the grandstanding criminals who cross paths with him (including Jamie Foxx and Jon Hamm in excellent supporting roles).
The other side of “Baby Driver” involves a romance with Debora, a diner waitress played by Lily James. The relationship is defined by scenes of heightened flirtation — Wright shoots these dialogue-driven scenes with as much verve as the chases. Baby and Debora share a passion for music and they’re attracted to each other’s mystique. On paper, the relationship is a little thin, but Wright, practically a historian of genre and visual storytelling, knows how to incite the courtship with cinematic flourishes. Their love story feels rather “Old Hollywood,” or for a more modern comparison, as engaging as Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone in the fanciful first act of “La La Land.”
“Baby Driver” doesn’t subvert its genre the way Wright managed to do to the cop genre in “Hot Fuzz” or the zombie thriller in “Shaun of the Dead.” But the movie isn’t trying to upend anything, and it ultimately becomes a unique, high-class version of a car-centric caper.
In many ways, it’s a smarter, more mature approach for Wright. He’s found a way to pay homage to a genre he loves by telling a new and exciting story within it. Watching “Shaun of the Dead” and “Hot Fuzz,” themselves excellent representations of their genres, sort of ruins the experience of watching more straightforward, Hollywood depictions of zombie thrillers and cop movies. They celebrate while dismantling.
“Baby Driver” makes you want more from the caper genre, and not necessarily just from Wright. It proves the genre’s vitality and celebrates its stunt-based simplicity. For that, I’m glad the filmmaker is expanding into new places and proving his expertise to the uninitiated. This is, objectively, his best piece of film-making, and I can’t wait to see Wright challenge himself again with his next project.
Now, could “Baby Driver” still use a Simon Pegg cameo? Absolutely. Don’t change too much for me, Edgar.
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Tyler Wilson can be reached at twilson@cdapress.com.