Baby Driver

Nowhere to Run To, Baby. Nowhere to Hide..."
or
"In This Business, the Moment You Catch Feelings, You Catch a Bullet"

The new film by Edgar Wright—he of Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, Scott Pilgrim vs the World and his first film since his extended work on what would be Ant-Man—is called Baby Driver and could almost be called a new genre, the musical crime drama. Oh, there've been things like Guys and Dolls and even the weird Bugsy Malone, but they're of the dialogue-song-dialogue-song variety. Baby Driver is a film built around a long string of pop tunes, not unlike the technique George Lucas used in American Graffiti, creating an atmosphere of music that the characters walk through, informing their steps and slyly commenting on events, like a prerecorded Greek Chorus.

The music starts a few seconds into the film, with the flick of an Ipod dial and the introduction of Jon Hamm, Eliza Gonzales and Jon Bernthal each one cut to on a double beat, then exiting from the car that has rolled into the very first shot eclipsing the bank that is the intended target of a bank-robbery. The driver, Baby (Ansel Elgort, pretty much unrecognizable from the part he played in The Fault in Our Stars, which was mostly verbal—here, he rarely talks and it's a performance of movement and attitude), dressed like Han Solo, sits in the car and waits, engine off. He puts in the earbuds of an Ipod.

And, then this stone-face act he's had disappears; to the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion song "Bellbottoms," he starts to bop in the driver's seat. He lip-syncs, he jives, he shimmies, follows the drum-beats on the dashboard and the car-door, air-guitar's and air-violin's. He's quite the spectacle...to the point where you wonder if it's reality or not; maybe he's gone off in his own little world that has nothing to do with sitting in a hot-red 20007 Subaru Impreza WRX, waiting for shots to be fired and the sound of running feet. He won't here them, though, with the music going full-blast in his head.

When the trio of robbers does exit, however, that's when the song kicks into high gear and the film along with it. Bernthal gives the signal to go ahead and Baby jams it into reverse, the first of many instinctual moves that will have him careening through and against traffic on Atlanta streets to avoid pursuit. To say it is an amazing sequence, dangerous and thrilling (and damned ingenious) is not giving it enough credit. But, tie it in with the music as seamlessly as it does and you've got something that might be called "Extreme Ballet."

And that's before the credits, which is a brilliant little sequence done to Bob & Earl's "Harlem Shuffle." Baby is on a coffee run, ear-buds in place, bopping to the music, the activity of the whole street in time with the music and his weaving between light-posts and traffic—even street-signs and graffiti highlight lyrics as he makes his way on his journey. This is great stuff and the entire movie is filled with things like this, all in tune with Baby, who, unfortunately is about to have the best of times and the worst of times in his life.

Baby is a getaway driver for Doc (Kevin Spacey), a criminal mastermind with a rotating number of hoods, routinely setting up jobs in the Atlanta area, but with one consistent member of his squad—Baby is always the guy behind the wheel, a "young Mozart in a go-kart" (as Doc calls him) because nobody is better. Yes, he's odd, and the professional hoods he takes on his thrill rides are a bit distrustful of his idiosyncracies—the ear-buds and Ipod and perpetual music (which is explained by a constant tinitis, "a hum in the drum," which the music drowns out), the passive attitude, the dark-glasses, the relatively little talking, his youth—the professional hoods (who aren't exactly what you'd call "normal," either) find him an oddity, which makes putting their lives in his hands a risk. They make a display of busting his chops, which he just deflects.

"That's my "Baby.'" says Doc, proudly.

Which is the point.

It's also probably the most conventional part of the movie. Baby Driver is a heist movie and here's the audience participation part of this review: what is the most used trope about career criminal movies?

I'll wait.

It's the "last-job" scenario: the expert criminal decides that he's going to do that "one last (sometimes "big") job" so he can retire and live a lawful and "committed-to-a-significant-other" life. (See "Godfather Part III: Every time I try to get OUT, they pull me back in...!") Been there, done that—the comedy version AND the tragedy version—(Huston, Kubrick, Hitchcock, Dassin) et cetera, et cetera. They say that all the stories have been told (and there are a limited number of stories from which to draw on—how many depends on how generous whoever is pulling the statistics out of thin air is. What makes a great film is how the story is told, what it brings to the plot, how it fleshes it out. A lot of people have done the "last job" trope.

But, nobody's done this like Baby Driver.

Sure, the story feels familiar—he's gotten into this life to pay off a debt of some sort (we are never made privy to what), but it may have something to do with his deaf and handicapped foster-father, Joseph (CJ Jones). After that first job, Baby declares himself to Doc:

Baby: One more job and I'm done.
Doc: "One more job" and we're straight. Now I don't think I need to give you the speech about what would happen if you say no, how I could break your legs and kill everyone you love because you already know that, don't you? 

And then, the stakes get higher: before, it was just Joseph Baby had to worry about. Now, he has to worry about the girl who's been glimpsed previously on his coffee runs and is now a focus in his life, Debora (Lily James—whose entrance into his psyche is spelled out by the song she absent-mindedly sings when she passes him in the diner she's working at, Carla Thomas' "B-A-B-Y"*). The two meet casually, but both fall hard, and pretty soon they're sharing an Ipod together and a dream to get away from all this. That becomes Baby's goal, but before he can do that, he must protect everything he holds dear to make a clean break, except he falls under suspicion from the paranoid robbers who all begin to know each other a little too well—"Buddy" (Hamm), "Darling" (Rodriguez), the too-smart-for-his-own-good-(or-anyone else's) "Bats" (Jamie Foxx), and "Doc," who is not above making bad on his threats...especially when they find a mini-recorder on Baby, which he uses to make and mix his own songs in an autobiographical cassette-library. The gang think he's an informant, with the most obvious "wire" in the world—but it's just one more piece in what makes Baby Baby, and threatens to make his life un-spooled.

Back in my review of Alien: Covenant, I made a case that Ridley Scott was not much of a director—a great art director, sure, and a genius visualist in league with his cinematographers. Imagery over substance and certainly over story sense. You could make the case (a losing one) that Baby Driver suffers from the same weakness. But, what Scott lacks is obvious that Wright has: style...and one that meshes with his subject matter, no matter how different the subject matter. He will adapt to the source and fill that world with detail and tricks that inform and enhance the story and make it unique and surprising, no matter how familiar the basic structure of the story may be. That's real film-making...and real fun.

Want to see how choreographed this is?

Check out the graffiti on the walls aping the lyrics.

 An action/ chase scene where the action, shots, editing—even the sound-effects—are enhanced

by the background song: "Hocus Pocus" by Focus 

It's violent, but, man, this is intricate film-making.

* It's one of the subjects of their lives: "Baby" has a multitude of songs with his name in it (and even more with his real name); Debora—poor, disadvantaged girl—has only two.