DRIVING MISS DAISY: Blu-ray re-issue (Warner Bros./Zanuck Co., 1989) Warner Archive

Our present pop culture is so disastrously overrun in a simpleton’s saturation of youth-oriented fast-paced/effects-laden crass commercialism, I had quite forgotten how refreshingly original and startlingly true-to-life, director, Bruce Beresford’s Driving Miss Daisy (1989) is and has, in fact, remained in the intervening decades. For here is a movie that dares, with ample humor, and, more than a modicum of verisimilitude, to create a snapshot from time that yields to an earthy genuineness almost by accident, aimed directly at our hearts and with a clear-eyed reflection, anchored in a reality from which the South has yet, arguably, to emerge. There is a distinction to be made – a huge one, in fact – between employing the camera to tell the truth and merely using it to effectively recreate ‘period’, bedecked in the vintage trappings from another era. Driving Miss Daisy just feels ‘real’ as opposed to ‘reel’ – the tender machinations outlined in Alfred Uhry’s screenplay (based on his play) proving so much more than just the creative ‘connective tissue’ on which to hang dialogue-heavy exchanges between two very potent personalities, embodies on the screen by the eloquently understated, Morgan Freeman and beautifully brittle, Jessica Tandy. Something about Peter James’ cinematography too, gingerly basking in the afterglow of that perpetually warm and enveloping Vermeer lit canvas, just rings with an inspired sense of being there – the picture, alive in the moment and in perfect complement to the performances.  

Driving Miss Daisy hails from an entirely different epoch in the picture-making biz that, alas, is no more, the mid-budgeted class ‘A’ drama, to derive its stature and success from a finely wrought script and situated squarely on the strengths of its actors’ talents to sustain scene upon scene in which no car chases, sexually explicit encounters, or other lurid or otherwise ‘shocking’ outbursts occur for the duration of its run time. Yet, even from the ‘then’ fast-fading eon of eighties American cinema, Driving Miss Daisy stands head and shoulders above virtually all other like-minded dramas presented throughout the decade, and this in a decade to have produced such eventful entertainments steeped in the past imperfect of racial inequity as Places in the Heart (1984) and Mississippi Burning (1988). Tolerance is the order of the day here, the quietly anxious, but still well-ensconced social acceptance of a caste system based on skin color, and, in which non-Caucasian domestics and chauffeurs are expected to ‘know their place’, overseen by well-intended and, if fortunate enough, benevolent whites who continued to reign from their vantage of smug superiority. Times, as they used to say, however, were ‘a-changin’, and Driving Miss Daisy addresses this unease, if mostly from a quiet place of contemplation. The brewing of the Civil Rights Movement – in which these inklings from another time are stirred, to leave the status quo, totally unaccustomed and, arguably, incapable of mending its ways peaceably on their own, even moreover, unprepared to rise to the socially progressive challenges of tomorrow, are represented in the delicate softening over time of the inelastic character of Miss Daisy Werthan.

Jessica Tandy’s finest hour on the screen tells the tale of an intractable wealthy widow who positively refuses to accept the slow, but steady erosion of that principled world from her youth, dwindled in both its character and resiliency to the point where her only refuge from the outside is her stately mansion, hermetically sealed in the memories from this fast-evaporating past. Into this perfect place from a decidedly (im)perfect past, intrudes the unsuspecting, but mindful ‘hired help’ – Hoke Colburn (Morgan Freeman), begrudgingly tolerated as the ‘necessary evil’ put upon Daisy’s good graces by her well-intended son, Boolie (Dan Aykroyd) after she damn-near injures herself in a terrifically clumsy automobile accident that all but totals her car. Daisy is accustomed to blacks of the servant class, her unobtrusive domestic, Idella (Esther Rolle), having been with the family for years. However, Hoke’s arrival is met with a most unwelcomed and critical acrimony, perhaps only as his presence represents – at least for Miss Daisy – another crucial step in depriving her of her freedom. Indeed, Daisy looks upon Hoke with more than a modicum of disdain for the ostentatiousness having a chauffeur represents in this close-knit community of jaundice and myopic views, also, to embarrassingly infer a perceived incapacity to do for herself on her own terms. And thus, the clash of wills – on the road to a most unlikely, enduring, and, wholly unique friendship – begins.

Driving Miss Daisy remains one of the most unvarnished and intelligent meditations on race relations and unquestionably, one of the finest ‘screen’ achievements from the 1980's – a decade, oft criticized for its whack-tacular, pre-processed gunk, mass-marketed as ‘art’. Having lived through the 1980's, I will simply preface the bulk of my praise herein by stating ‘you just had to be there!’ No scant summary in review, nor even an in-depth retrospective, will suffice to bottle the breadth of its pie-eyed optimism. And, were it possible to time travel, I would not hesitate for a moment to make the journey back to that time where I can now acknowledge I was most readily content. It was a grand time to be young and alive and to feel both young and alive, even at 72 – the same age as this film’s protagonist. Driving Miss Daisy rectifies Hollywood’s long-standing aversion to explore, much less celebrate, the richness and rewards that only time itself can bring to a life. If the elderly are represented at all in movies today, then it is mostly as bitterly reclusive, angry and careworn hermits, exiled from and by the world at large, or, laughably put up as doddering old fools, idiotically to turn back these yellowed pages with some thoroughly misguided behaviors and mannerisms that make them even more piteously pathetic for their hard-earned wrinkles and well-seasoned life experiences. Indeed, when Richard and Lily Zanuck began shopping Driving Miss Daisy around town, they quickly discovered the biases of youth-centric film culture.  As Zanuck would later recount, “Everybody would say, ‘we know you’re going to make a good picture – but nobody is going to want to see it!’”  One of life’s ironies, the inevitability of those advancing golden years coming to us all, generally never gets discussed – the natural progression from youth to middle-age, and finally, the emeritus years, hardly fit for topical debate – especially in the movies. And yet, this is precisely were Alfred Uhry’s off-Broadway play lives. The other great revelation in its stagecraft and the resultant movie, deals with that unflattering ‘separate but equal’ segregation to have gripped the South long after the American Civil War; Uhry, drawing upon his own upbringing in creating these meaningful parallels between prejudices faced by both blacks and Jews.

The reticence in Hollywood to produce Driving Miss Daisy may also have had something to do with Tinsel Town’s then, more recent ageism, as it could come off as too ‘highbrow’. As is often the case, what works theatrically readily proves problematic when a show is ‘opened up’ for the more expansive demands of the motion picture. If anything, the overwhelming consensus, that no one would want to see a ‘kitchen melodrama’ about old people, made the Zanucks even more resolved to get the necessary funding to make Driving Miss Daisy a reality. Paying for preliminary location scouting from their own savings, and, on nothing more than a blind promise from Warner Bros. to ‘probably’ write them a blank reimbursement, Richard Zanuck hired Australian-born, Bruce Beresford to direct; also, the stage’s Morgan Freeman, who had expressed a desire to reprise as Miss Daisy’s devoted chauffeur. In retrospect, the casting of Freeman proves the picture’s first stroke of genius, further advanced when Zanuck also called upon Alfred Uhry to adapt his own material. Both men concurred, the age of the actress to play Daisy Werthan needed to be true to the character with minimal makeup trickery; a decision, effectively to narrow the Zanucks’ search for viable actresses still working in the biz.

Driving Miss Daisy offers an unaffected and unapologetic snapshot of old age: not as ‘a condition’ to be quaintly pitied or casually set aside. Rather, the film’s authenticity is all in accepting these latter stages in the circle of life, to appreciate and simply define them as truth itself – neither openly revered nor dramatically acknowledged, through laughter and pathos, cued by this eloquent mixture with a modicum of dignity. In Morgan Freeman and Jessica Tandy’s gifted hands, Driving Miss Daisy becomes the very valediction of this stubbornly human valor to resist the corruption of youth. Moreover, the picture remains a benediction made by two individuals from diametrically disparate social backgrounds who, nevertheless, discover an unlikely common ground where each can more clearly witness the similarities that bind to their seemingly irreconcilable principles – resulting in an admirable richness set to unfold in the sunset of their lives. The sheer joy in this exercise is its subtlest ripening of that unmistakable coming together, parceled in nuggets of wisdom that celebrate the inevitable acceptance of humanity as a singular entity, unencumbered by these artificially conceived barriers of race. Uhry based Daisy Werthan on his grandmother/her chauffeur, on the family’s hired man, Will Coleman. And in Tandy and Freeman, we are given the forever cherished strengths from that inimitable reality, untainted by the ‘then’ contemporary strain in which the picture itself was conceived, rather uncannily to adhere instead to the fidelity of those social mores from that ‘other’ particular period in which the movie’s faux reality exists. Freeman came to the movie well-versed, having performed Hoke for nearly three years on the stage. Tandy was the movie’s fresh face, possessing an impeccable pedigree of theatrical experiences that had not always translated well to the screen. Indeed, Tandy’s tenure in the movies was spotty at best. Yet, in hindsight, her stage training affords Beresford to rehearse Tandy in the part until he was perfectly satisfied with the form and content of her alter-ego’s character.

Because Driving Miss Daisy was shot on a shoestring (the studio repeatedly slashing its budget during preliminary preparations), Beresford and the Zanucks improvised practically everything on location. A small rural town just outside of Atlanta became the Atlanta of the 1940’s, 50’s and 60’s with just a little window-dressing and fresh paint. The Werthan house was an actual Atlanta residence rented inside and out for the shoot; cinematographer, Peter James employing diffused lighting to light the interiors through its actual windows.  The last bit of verisimilitude visited upon the film was Hans Zimmer’s memorable ‘Driving Theme’, extemporized with intermittent techno influences while observing a rough cut of the scene where Jessica Tandy’s caustic widow is pursued by Morgan Freeman’s mildly perturbed chauffeur, trailing her every step in a brand-new Hudson automobile. Above all else, Driving Miss Daisy remains a testament to the renaissance of the South, awkwardly, clumsily, but valiantly blundering beyond its argumentative uncertainties into the modern-day progressivism that has since, regrettably, turned much of its passionate history asunder. Uhry’s lyrical dialogue is, at times, just this side of edgy, as he illustrates the societal constraints meant to keep time-honored conventions firmly affixed.

Our story begins on a typically humid summer’s morn, Daisy Werthan announcing to her housemaid, Idella (Esther Rolle) she is off to market. Alas, this trip is cut short when Miss Daisy manages to back her car off her elevated driveway and over the edge of the neighbor’s sunken patio wall. The insurance company promptly cancels her policy, forcing Daisy’s son, Boolie to hire his mother a chauffeur. This decision, like another made previous – to marry the frivolous, Florine (Patti Lupone) does not meet with Daisy’s approval. Indeed, during his first week’s employ, Hoke Colburn is all but ignored and frequently admonished for making any and all attempts to be useful around the house. Instead, he is ordered to refrain from speaking to Idella, or dust lamp bulbs on the chandelier in the dining room, even frowned upon to quietly linger, casually observing the various family portraits in the hall. However, when Miss Daisy sets her mind to take the trolley to market, Hoke decides he has had quite enough of her prudery and follows his employer down the street at a snail’s pace in her newly purchased Hudson, thus attracting nosey glances from the neighbors. To quell their curiosity and save herself some embarrassment, Miss Daisy gets into the car, forcing Hoke to abide by her rules as he drives her to the Piggly Wiggly for some groceries. While she shops, Hoke hurries to a nearby phone booth, declaring to Boolie “Yes sir, I just drove yo’ mama to the store. Only took six days…same time it took the Lord to create the whole world!”

For some time thereafter, Miss Daisy’s brittle contempt does not abate. She continues to regard Hoke as one of ‘those people’ and forces Boolie to drive out to the house after she suspects Hoke of stealing a can of smoked salmon from her pantry. But when Hoke arrives with a newly purchased can of salmon to replace the one eaten, Miss Daisy is quietly chagrined. From here on, her relationship with Hoke begins to soften. Hence, when Miss Daisy announces her intentions to travel to Mobile, Alabama for her brother, Walter’s 90th birthday, she employs Hoke to drive her this considerable distance. Along their journey, they are confronted by a pair of racist state troopers (Ray McKinnon and Ashley Josey) who momentarily question Hoke and Miss Daisy about the ownership of their expensive vehicle.  Narrowly averting a scene, a slightly flustered Miss Daisy accidentally encourages Hoke to make a wrong turn, the two losing their way along a dark and lonely road. When Hoke admits he must pull over to the side to relieve himself, Miss Daisy orders him to wait until they reach Mobile. “I’m not just some back of the neck you look at while you get to where you’re goin’,” Hoke explains, “I’m a man.” To prove his point, Hoke takes the keys with him as he disappears into the darkness. A few disquieting moments pass. Miss Daisy becomes frightened and calls for Hoke. A short while later, they arrive safely at Walter’s house to celebrate his birthday.

Driving Miss Daisy is, among its many other fine attributes, a skillful ‘opening up’ of the stage-bound original. Beresford and Uhry sparsely use montage and the changing seasons to cleverly advance both the timeline and friendship burgeoning between Hoke and Miss Daisy as it ripens. A trip to the graveyard proves unexpectedly poignant when Miss Daisy asks Hoke to place flowers on her sister’s grave. Hoke confides he never learned to read and thus cannot decipher names on the tombstones. Instead, Miss Daisy refutes Hoke’s claim, phonetically sounding out the letters to bolster his confidence. Later, Daisy gives Hoke a child’s reader she used while a teacher in the public schools, reiterating the point that “It’s not a Christmas present. Jews have no business giving Christmas presents.” Nevertheless, Hoke sets himself to learn. As in the play, the first and second acts of Driving Miss Daisy are almost exclusively focused on the subtle enrichment of this unlikely friendship, peppered in poignantly understated ‘little’ moments of self-discovery that sparkle and resonate as quiet truths. But the latter third of our story is devoted almost exclusively to the inevitable passage of time. The first lesson to be learned is loss. Idella suffers a fatal heart attack and dies while preparing dinner. Her funeral is a distinct reminder of the ephemeral quality of human life. As we enter the turbulent sixties, Miss Daisy is exposed to bigotry of a different sort when an unknown assailant bombs the synagogue on her way to prayer. This was an incident culled from Uhry’s remembrances of an actual event – the movie’s timeline suggesting 1966, when in reality the bombing occurred in 1958. To ease Miss Daisy’s concerns, Hoke relays a story from childhood about his best friend’s father lynched by an angry mob. Despite her repeated insistence about not being prejudiced, Miss Daisy is unable to see the parallel in Hoke’s parable, the plight of antisemitism and racial inequality, more than a moment of disclosure and self-discovery for these characters.

Miss Daisy receives an invitation to a gala where Martin Luther King will speak. Offering two tickets to Boolie and Florine, Boolie accepts, but later bows out, citing his attendance might ‘color’ the opinions of his contemporaries in the business and professional community, alliances he has worked too long and hard to forge and cultivate. Amused by his mother’s sudden interest in Dr. King, Boolie suggests she invite Hoke as her guest. Miss Daisy denies Hoke the same opportunity to partake. Instead, she has him drive her to the gala and wait outside, surrounded by a congregation of affluent blacks and whites, while Hoke patiently listens to the same speech being broadcast on the radio from the car. Dr. King’s words resonate a fundamental truth about race relations in America. It is an eloquent address for a more enduring understanding between blacks and whites in which “history will have to record, that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.”

Driving Miss Daisy’s last act remains a bittersweet epitaph. Daisy, now in her nineties, begins to suffer from the onset of dementia, frantically meandering through her house, believing she has somehow regressed to an undisclosed time when she was still a school teacher. Hoke arrives to discover her overwrought and extremely confused, ranting about misplaced papers. He telephones Boolie to report the incident, but then, gingerly tries to comfort and console his employer. Struck in a moment of clarity, Miss Daisy declares, “Hoke, you’re my best friend”, loosely clutching his hand. The two regard one another in a moment of sustained silence. We fast track a few years ahead. Miss Daisy’s stately manor has been sold. Boolie, meets an aged Hoke in the empty parlor before taking him to the retirement home for Thanksgiving where Daisy is spending her final years. At first, unclear whether she even knows they have come to see her, the fog suddenly lifts as Daisy orders Boolie to ‘go and charm the nurses.’  Hoke takes his seat beside her, offering Daisy a piece of pumpkin pie, their silent assignation translated into an affecting farewell. Likely, this will be is the last time they ever see one another. Director, Beresford’s subtle superimposition of Miss Daisy’s Hudson driving into the distance is an eloquent visual euphemism, not only for the many adventures Hoke and Daisy have shared, but also, perhaps, a foreshadowing of the final journey she has made from this life into the next; a very tender reminiscence on the transient quality of life itself, and a gentle nod to that once vital and remarkable friendship.

Driving Miss Daisy’s reflection on the emeritus years that swift approach and unexpectedly creep up to envelope us all remains a beautifully ‘imperfect’ snapshot of the unlikeliest amity blossoming between two people who might otherwise have never met. The irony is, of course, that under any other circumstance in any other wrinkle in time prior to it, these two would not have been allowed to meet. In the final rot of the ‘old South’, those lingering racial stringencies have elapsed just enough to draw Miss Daisy and Hoke together, awkwardly ‘separate’ and yet to be considered truly as ‘equals’ in the new South. Driving Miss Daisy went on from its respectable opening weekend to steadily build in stature and box office, the escalation of its financial success capped off by 9 Oscar nominations and 4 wins, including Best Picture and Best Actress – Jessica Tandy; then, the oldest recipient to receive the honor. In accepting her statuette, the ever-gracious Tandy could not help but exuberantly declare, “I am on cloud nine!”

But in hindsight, it is the Oscar oversights that are even more glaring: Morgan Freeman, passed over for Best Actor, and Bruce Beresford not even nominated for his flawless direction – a bungle marginally corrected when Richard Zanuck, accepting for the Best Picture statuette, opened his remarks with, “This only proves that Bruce Beresford is the best director in the world.”  Academy history is riddled with such inconsistencies. Yet, these stand in relief as a complete insult to both men. In the final analysis, Driving Miss Daisy is as good as movies get, true to life, true to its source, and, truer still to the humanity of its characters. It really does not get any better than this! Beresford and the Zanuck’s ‘little picture’ superficially trades on the tattered, if time-honored cliché, ‘the road is for journeys’. But what a trip it proves to be. Driving Miss Daisy may have driven off with a slew of well-deserved accolades. But the picture today is hardly buoyed by its prestige. Awards are nice. But they rarely speak to the intangible hallmarks of any movie’s greatness – ditto for box office or glowing critical reviews. Longevity can only be judged with the passage of time, and, the endurance of memory to support it. Driving Miss Daisy is that kind of movie, once seen, never forgotten, and to leave a warm afterglow in the minds of those who have seen it.  It remains, perhaps, as Zanuck attested to back in 1989, “my finest hour and the movie I’m most proud of.”

Warner Archive’s re-issue of Driving Miss Daisy on Blu-ray (it was originally a Warner Home Video’s digi-pack Blu-ray) has failed to rectify the sins committed on that original hi-def release. There are issues with color density, sharpness and contrast levels. Peter James’ cinematography was never intended to exhibit a crisp, high key-lit gloss; rather, a softly diffused glow. That quality has been lovingly preserved herein. But the image is too dark. Even late-day afterglow from the sun, filtering through the heavy slats of Miss Daisy’s window treatments is dull rather than diffused. Naturally lit interiors are extremely dusky even in the full bloom of noonday sun, unable to be appreciated for their stately character. I understand the point of subtlety in James’ cinematography. But the image on this disc is so dark it borders on creating a Gordon Willis-esque eye-strain with one notable distinction. Willis’ use of immaculate highlights is wholly absent here.  Film grain is richly represented. But colors become muddy and muted rather than nuanced and understated. There is also a sort of residual blurriness in background details.  The image isn’t soft and dewy by design, but questionably fuzzy and out of focus. Finally, there is some built-in instability in this image harvest, a curious intermittent strobe, as though viewing from an old analog TV broadcast with an airplane flying overhead to disturb the signal. It is virtually unnoticeable on smaller sets, but in projection it becomes glaringly obvious and utterly distracting.

My thoughts that something is decidedly remiss with both the film’s color density and contrast derives from clips excised from the movie for the documentary, ‘Things are Changing’ (included herein) and originally produced just a few short years ago when the aforementioned digibook version was released to Blu-ray. These clips exhibit a considerably lighter and brighter image, looking far more natural and appealing, and, to reveal much more overall image clarity and crispness. As example: the scene where Hoke convinces Miss Daisy to allow him to chauffeur her to the store for the very first time. In the movie, this sequence is so dark every time a shadow from an overhead tree passes across the reflective surface of the front windshield, it completely obscures Miss Daisy from our view. In the clip, as excised for the documentary, this scene retains the aforementioned shadows, but they do not obscure, rather to subtly pass over and augment the scene, adding visual texture and emphasis. The 5.1 DTS audio is a vast improvement we can support. There are subtler nuances to observe, as though listening to Hans Zimmer’s score for the very first time. Extras are singularly disappointing. We get the aforementioned featurette ‘Things are Changing’ – that provides an overview of race relations in America then and now, referencing the movie when it can. It’s an interesting addendum, but not terribly comprehensive. As for the rest – everything is a port over from Warner Home Video’s tired ole DVD: a brief featurette on Jessica Tandy’s prolific stage career and another, even briefer, on the making of the film, and finally, a vintage promo puff piece, tacked onto a careworn theatrical trailer. The best of the lot is the audio commentary from Beresford – informative and engaging. I would like to be the first to champion Warner to re-remaster this Oscar-winning masterpiece.  Because Driving Miss Daisy on Blu-ray is something of a letdown. It deserves far better.

FILM RATING (out of 5 – 5 being the best)

5+

VIDEO/AUDIO

3

EXTRAS

2