Movie Review: 'Learning To Drive'
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) --- Well, if you've had it up to HERE with explosive summer comic-book flicks, here's a splendid alternative.
Learning to Drive is an excursion worth taking, a double character study that centers on the seemingly parallel experiences of two appealing and revealing characters.
Patricia Clarkson stars in this audience-friendly comedy-drama as well-heeled but vulnerable Manhattan book critic Wendy Shields, who is reeling and licking her wounds because her longtime (over two decades) husband, Ted, an English professor played by Jake Weber, has just walked out on her as a result of his affair with a younger colleague.
Her daughter, Tasha, played by Grace Gummer, sees that her mother is distraught and invites her to Vermont, but New Yorker Wendy has never bothered to learn to drive.
So she adds learning to drive to the group of activities she has decided to take up as a way of breaking her New York City routine and begin again. Never having driven a car before, she signs up for driving lessons.
Her instructor, played by co-star Ben Kingsley, is immigrant and political refugee Darwan Singh Tur, a spiritual Sikh Indian driving teacher and United States citizen who has been in New York since before 9/11, lives in a cramped basement apartment in Queens, is a more-than-occasional victim of racial profiling, protects his live-in, illegal-immigrant nephew from the Immigration and Naturalization Service, always wears a turban, and moonlights as a cab driver.
The dignified and patient Darwan is in the process of marrying a woman he has never even met, played by Sarita Choudhury, which is why he is saving his money.
So Darwan is about to begin a marriage just as Wendy comes to the end of hers. Think you know where this is headed? Don't be so sure.
That these two middle-aged characters are going to be yanked out of their comfort zones and have a profound effect on one another goes without saying, but the predictability of that narrative arc does not in any way diminish the pleasure of watching it happen, especially with acting of this high a caliber.
Learning to Drive was adapted by screenwriter Sarah Kernochan from an autobiographical essay in the New Yorker by Katha Pollitt.
There have been plenty of New York-set movies, to say the least, but few of them boast a sense of place as strong and as sharp a take on The Big Apple as melting pot as that achieved in Learning to Drive.
Behind the movie's wheel is Spanish director Isabel Coixet (My Life without Me, The Secret Life of Words, Another Me), who also directed her Learning to Drive leads, Kingsley and Clarkson, in 2008's Elegy. She gets excellent mileage out of the performances of her two leads, allowing them the time and space in that confining driver's-education car to paint their vivid portraits with natural, unforced gestures large and, mostly, small.
So the film is, among other things, a reminder of why Kingsley is an Oscar winner (Gandhi) as well as a four-time nominee (Bugsy, Sexy Beast, House of Sand and Fog) and why Clarkson is an Academy Award nominee (Pieces of April) as well as a very busy and accomplished actress.
If the film attracts enough of an audience, don't be surprised if Clarkson gets her second Oscar nod.
So we'll check the rearview mirror for 3 stars out of 4.
Learning to Drive is an observant, insightful, and touching light dramedy, a delightful two-hander with rich, nuanced performances by two of our most gifted and dependable, if not revered and lauded, screen actors. You won't need much more than a glance at Clarkson and Kingsley going through their thespian paces to know that this vehicle will easily pass inspection.
