.

.
Director/ Screenwriter: Edgar Wright

By Roderick Heath

A heist scene, both in life and in movies, is traditionally a scene of fear, ferocity, chaos, and sometimes bloodshed. Edgar Wright’s Baby Driver kicks off on the other hand with a sequence of startling formal artistry and glib humour as its hero, who remains for nearly the entire film known purely by the sobriquet of Baby (Ansel Elgort), sits behind the wheel, waiting in a car whilst criminal associates pillage a bank, bopping and miming along to the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion’s thunderous rocker “Bellbottoms.” Once the proper bandits, Buddy (Jon Hamm) and his wife Darling (Eiza Gonzalez), and ally Griff (Jon Bernthal), dash back to the car and cry for Baby to step on it, the young ace takes off and leads the cops on a merry chase through downtown Atlanta, wreaking choreographed mayhem, the raucous yet fleet and graceful action carefully interwoven with frenetic music. Pile-ups are neatly contrived, a row of tyre spikes neatly flicked from under Baby’s wheels under the the tyres of a pursuit vehicle like a soccer player flicking a ball off their heel, rules of man and physics casually subverted in a car chase that exploits the layout of Atlanta’s streets to turn them into a zone akin to Pac Man’s classically boxy, labyrinthine field of action.
.

.
Baby eventually delivers himself and his charges in safe, slick fashion to their rendezvous with fence and heist planner Doc (Kevin Spacey). When performing his usual post-job ritual of fetching coffee for all, Baby strides down the street, now to the swing-and-slide saunter of Bob and Earl’s “Harlem Shuffle.” The streetscape snaps into the groove filling Baby’s ears, the whole world taking on a funkified rhythm, the actions of the pedestrians and the variegated colourings of the street suggesting the choreography in a Vincent Minnelli or Jacques Demy movie without quite bursting out into proper song and dance. It’s more as if Baby’s immersion instead helps him see the natural music of life about him, keen to the manifold forms expression intersecting in metropolitan life. Baby halts for a moment to mimic the pose on a sprawling work of public art, and the lyrics to the song he’s listening to are written on street lamps. All setting the scene for a moment that will change Baby’s life, as he sees the girl of his lifetime, Debora (Lily James) striding past the coffee shop.
.

.
Edgar Wright’s directorial feature oeuvre to date – A Fistful of Fingers (1995), Shaun of the Dead (2004), Hot Fuzz (2007), Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World (2011), and The World’s End (2014) – testifies to a talent whose gifts emerge in a devious fashion, realised best when taking seriously things many other people would never pause to think too hard about. On top of formidable visual skill, his films have been thus far both burlesques upon and valentines to beloved movies, music, games, and comics, but are also case studies of people caught in varying stages of development, often arrested but not always unhappily or unproductively, commenting with a good–natured humour that often belies the concision of his satiric streak on the state of modern being in which the tests of character and fortitude that come our way in contemporary life tend to be random, even surreal. Shaun of the Dead reprocessed the basic notions of George Romero’s zombie movies but critiqued their critique, negating the appealing edge of macho fantasy and stern, straighten-up-and-fly-right tenor of most such survivalist horror tales, to celebrate our right to be slouchy slackers when life offers little else that’s more satisfying. Hot Fuzz, the most overt spoof amongst Wright’s films, walked cop and horror clichés through the anxieties of characters who feel stymied in their careers and cheated of the best uses of their gifts, whilst Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World described the problems of trying to reconcile the drug-like power of romanticism with hard truths and the hunt for authenticity via a series of gaudy comic book situations and virtual reality adventures. The World’s End introduced an edge of middle-aged hysteria to his template as it mocked Invasion of the Body Snatchers-style tales but also analysed its heroes’ bilious refusal to change in the face of their own abused and decaying flesh and intractable natures.
.

.
Wright is one of the few filmmakers to take heart Quentin Tarantino’s most interesting facet, the one intrigued by the tension between lived experience and the cheering embrace of our cultural touchstones and obsessions, icons in a life journey that lend coherence to the way we see ourselves and orchestrate our days. Wright’s comedic touch has native aspects too, however, in such diverse fields as the sardonic, parochial touch of the Ealing comedy styles, the neurotic potency of the British sci-fi and horror schools, and the puckish, kinetic buoyancy of Richard Lester’s early swinging London adventures. For me, The World’s End failed to quite bring Wright to a new threshold of maturity, as it was also his most curiously misshapen and tonally indecisive work to date. Baby Driver, named for the saucy Simon and Garfunkel song that plays over the end credits, declares with its title an intention to conjure a legend of youthful vivacity, and sees Wright returning to North America for what is in part a romp through a landscape of cultural canards, and like Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World, his last foray there, focuses on a hero in the awkward space between childhood and manhood. One difference between Baby Driver and Wright’s earlier work however is its new approach to genre storytelling; Baby Driver is a tale of crime and revenge given a day-glo paint job, but still one that takes its pulp imperatives seriously.
.

.
Baby Driver’s antecedents are fairly obvious, as the film belongs to a subgenre of crime film that owes many of its tenets and essential ideas to Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samourai (1967), which essentially created the modern archetype of the stoic and emotionally uninvolved crime professional who is pushed at last into a personal struggle. Wright’s more immediate touchstone here, like Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive (2011), is Walter Hill’s The Driver (1978), which retranslated Melville’s precepts back into native American noir traditions (Wright gives Hill a cameo late in the film), and which owed a debt itself to Richard Fleischer’s first attempt to meld these styles, The Last Run (1971). Wright gives this a distinctive twist, of course, in his approach to Baby, whose veneer of detachment is not that of a world-weary pro but a happy-go-lucky kid who’s somehow gotten himself into a deadly line of work. The gimmick at the heart of the film revolves around Baby’s love for music, a love that has practical, even therapeutic aspects. He’s dogged by tinnitus and haunted by the death of his parents, particularly his chanteuse mother, both the result of a car accident that occurred during one of their many, often violent arguments. But music is also his way of keeping a clamouring, insistent, rather evil world at bay, of ordering and structuring his day, of imposing coherent limitations on jostling chaos and impositions. As long as the music is playing, Baby’s universe makes sense.
.

.
It’s very plain what Wright actually has in mind with Baby even as he conveys his experience through the trappings of thrills and spills: the experience of being a creative young man trying urgently to maintain equilibrium and a bubble of personal space when surrounded by thugs, bullies, and other energy vampires. Other criminals look askance at Baby’s habits. Griff takes on the role of schoolyard creep in trying to break into Baby’s private world, harassing him, tugging out his earbuds, slapping off his sunglasses, and trying to make him flinch with false punches. Baby successfully maintains his glaze of cool in the face of such predations, however, as he always has another pair of sunglasses and another iPod stocked up with killer tunes to retreat into. Wright contextualises Baby’s strange life as the film unfolds, revealing him as orphaned at a young age, placed into foster care with a deaf and elderly black man, Joseph (C.J. Jones), whom he now cares for in response. Baby grew up with a predilection for stealing cars, and developed his miraculous driving gifts eluding the cops that way. The notion of a white boy brought up by a black man has an overtone of cultural inference in addition to servicing character development. As well as evoking a sense of natural empathy between outcasts, as an avatar of pop culture in general, Baby is son of a rich and fecund sprawl of cosmopolitan artistic heritage, rejecting the brutal inheritance of his biological father, who beat his mother, in favour of celebrating his mother’s creativity and his adoptive father’s soul, making literal Jim Morrison’s comedic boasts about being the son of an old blues man. Baby has obtained his second, rather more Fagin-ish patriarch in the shape of Doc, who deliberately allowed Baby to jack a car of his with some valuable property aboard simply to admire his form and then announced to him he was going to work for him until he’d paid off what he cost him.
.

.
Baby expects to go his merry way once he’s finished working off the debt, and even confidently takes a job driving pizzas to please Joseph, who detests Baby’s involvement with crime. Meanwhile Baby sublimates his way of interacting with the world into fashioning pieces of artisanal, purely personal art: he records conversations and uses a pile of dated machinery to create brief, groovy mixes that turn the stuff of his life into art. Baby also mediates his own social dysfunction by utilising the same methods of sampling and remixing to fake his way through conversations, as when he uses some dialogue out of Monsters, Inc. (2001) to mollify Doc. Baby of course soon learns Doc has no intention of letting such an asset go, as Doc delivers threats to his person and loved-ones unless he keeps driving for him, a pivot that seems to render Doc’s status as his defender and arbiter entirely false. Baby’s emotional imperative to find a way out of his predicament gains new impetus as he falls under the spell of Debora, when he encounters her working at the diner he frequents because his mother once worked there too – from the moment Debora walks in singing the refrain of Carla Thomas’ “B-A-B-Y” it’s plain Debora is the woman for our hero, and it helps she’s a charming chatterbox who readily falls into a rhythm with the usually silent young man. Wright offers a vision of Debora hovering before a mural depicting a couple in a car racing for the sunset in a vintage roadster and Baby begins to experience faintly David Lynchian fantasies in black and white involving realising the moment with Debora. Wright conjures idealised girlfriends better than any director since Cameron Crowe, and some of the pictures he offers of Baby and Debora’s romancing, their feet bopping in sublime accord to the tune they’re listening to through shared earbuds and their fingers making music with the glasses on a restaurant table, are both expert pieces of observed behaviour with an added lustre of romanticism that plugs into the film’s almost religious sense of musicality.
.

.
The idea of making an action film that works like a dance film has an obvious magnificence to it, and the best and most frustrating aspects of Baby Driver are wound in with this idea, as Wright sets up the conceit but never follows through on it in quite the kind of mighty, silent movie, Keystone Kops-esque set-piece it seems to demand. Wright instead keeps the musical motif more like a metronomic pulse for the action, in keeping with Baby’s specific use for the music to structure and time his escapades. Baby gains what seems to be an exact polar opposite and natural adversary in the form of Bats (Jamie Foxx), a flashy hard-ass who quickly reveals a paranoid and ruthless, murderous streak. Bats commands a crew on the heist that marks what Baby thinks will be his last, also consisting of Eddie No-Nose (formerly Eddie Big-Nose; played by Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist Flea) and hapless JD (Lanny Joon). JD’s various screw-ups on the job, including leaving his shotgun in a car they flee and accidentally buying Austin Powers masks instead of Michael Myers of Halloween fame masks to wear in their robbery (“This is Mike Myers!”) earn him a brutal death at the hands of Bats (can anyone whose nerd lexicon is so poor survive long today?). Baby is handed the job of disposing of body and car in a junkyard press. Baby’s unavoidable humanity is the one roadblock he can’t navigate, natch.
.

.
Wright’s method of developing emotional involvement in Baby Driver is relatively smart and supple: Baby keeps gaining short, judicious glimpses of obscene violence, the stuff he’s so urgently trying to tune out whilst taking care of business. And yet he also shares with his director a quick and lucid eye for the stuff of everyday life that puts no-one in contempt until they earn it. His world is essentially one that’s kindly, filled with beaming cashiers, mothers with children, and other, casual passers-by, the people who tend to be knocked over, if they’re lucky, by careening and careless criminals. Baby is even so decent that in one scene when his life’s depending on it he delays his getaway a few moments to give the old lady whose car he’s stealing her purse. Even JD’s pathos is noted as Baby asks him about a tattoo that’s been altered from “hate” to “hat” to increase his chances of employment (“How’s that working for you?” “Who doesn’t like hats?”). Baby is left standing staring at the metal beast chewing up JD and the car, with nothing to do except drift away into the day, turn up the Commodores (has any other film ever wrung such poetic grace from the easy-listening manifesto that is “I’m Easy”?), and get on with the business of being alive.
.

.
Baby Driver is of course at heart a fun and carefree entertainment, but it’s not one that’s mindless. In fact it often struck me as having more to say about how many live now than quite a few more serious films, in its blithe and zipless fashion, faithful to the ephemera of behaviour – who hasn’t sat behind the wheel of their car bopping to a favourite song? The modern world offers a peculiar ability to us now, to be at once at large in the world but also to keep it at bay, something an invention like the iPod made easier, more freewheeling, less tethered than ever, and Wright plainly reveals a great affection for this invention (one whose era already seems to be ending) that at last realised the audiophile’s dream of carrying their record collection with them and never having to submit to the indignities of muzak and muffle the abuse of the world to a dull rumble. Wright even seems to gleefully court the diverse reaction people in the audience will have to Baby’s affectations, which will strike some as like self-portrait and others life a mass of infuriating tics and traits, reactions that might depend, perhaps, on one’s age and life experience – anyone who’s been ticked off at a teen relative who won’t divest themselves of their headphones or sniffs at hipster affectations like Baby’s craft-art collection of outmoded technologies might well react in a phobic manner to him. But Baby Driver isn’t merely about such cloistered pleasures. It’s most fundamentally about the moment that comes, or should come, in every life, when you have to turn the music off and abandon the personalised survival mechanisms that one develops when young, and pay proper attention to what’s happening in front of you. This even seems to me to be a general existential state at the moment.
.

.
As Doc forces him to continue with his life of crime, Baby nonetheless finds himself plunged back into the company of an all-star team of Doc’s pet badasses, including grizzled and wary Buddy, bombshell-in-both-senses Darling, and batshit Bats. Doc assembles this crew as he intends a robbery of a downtown post office to get hold of blank money orders, and gets Baby to scout the post office in the company of Doc’s young but already canny nephew Samm (Brogan Hall). Where the bullish and impatient Bats can barely restrain his contempt for Baby, Buddy seems to feel a certain affection for him, asking him about his tunes and revealing a similar youthful love for cars, a love that always has to be accompanied by a lucky driving song, which Baby reveals to him is Queen’s theatrical epic “Brighton Rock.” Bats puts the crew through a multiplicity of ordeals, seeming to kill a service station worker to make a robbery, snidely grilling Buddy about what he presumes is a yuppie lifestyle that’s slid into less dignified crimes (“Y’all do crimes to support a drug habit, I do drugs to support a crime habit.”), and threatening to shoot Debora when the crew visit the diner when she’s working there, an act Baby forestalls at risk to himself. Bats has already forced Buddy, Darling, and Baby to aid him in massacring an outfit of gun sellers they meet in an abandoned warehouse, upon the realisation they’re cops, without also realising they’re crooked lawmen in league with Doc (Paul Williams plays the showy frontman of this team, a character dubbed the Butcher, which could be the most unlikely match-up of actor to role since, well, Williams played the Mephistophelian Swan in Phantom of the Paradise, 1974).
.

.
The dichotomy of Buddy and Bats as they relate to Baby proves a miscue, at least to the extent that Buddy eventually proves far more dangerous to Baby. Although nominally a shift of ground into a less fantastical style than Wright has offered to date, Baby Driver picks up the running idea of all of his films, in which the adventure offers a coherent metaphor for the maturation, or lack of it, for the heroes, and even presents a variation on the essence of Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World where he must face and defeat a doppelganger, and Buddy is Baby’s, with similar background and loves, but one hardened into an underworld swashbuckler. Buddy’s potently carnal relationship with the younger but more than equally loco Darling sits in stark contrast with Baby’s tentative flirtations with Debora whilst also suggesting what they both might become a few years down the track if they are given up to a seedy and destructive world and lose all moral compass. Trapped between varieties of threat, Baby has to run a gauntlet as his beloved, utterly private hobby is exposed and subjected to merciless inspection by his confederates, as when he tries to sneak home to see Joseph he’s caught by Buddy and Bats, who also finds his tape recorder, and enlarge upon their roles as schoolyard bullies engaging in a glorified game of keep-away as they raid Baby’s apartment, steal his tapes and Joseph’s wheelchair, and force Baby to play his tapes and prove they’re merely harmless fodder for composition.
.

.
Baby’s attempts to be true to his own code even whilst swimming with sharks eventually forces crisis, as he warns away a pleasant cashier he spoke to whilst casing the post office. The cashier promptly fetches a cop, who arrives by Baby’s car just as Bats, Buddy, and Darling emerge with their haul. Bats shoots the cop dead, and the appalled and enraged Baby for a long moment refuses to move the car even as Bats points his shotgun in his face. When Baby does finally gun the motor, he slams the car into the back of a truck, impaling Bats upon steel poles and setting all hell loose. Police cars arrive and Buddy and Darling start a gunfight in the street, machine guns blazing in downtown as Baby flees on foot, desperately attempting to elude the pursuing cops in a parkour-tinged sequence that readily finds the same electric sense of motion and staging as the car chases. Baby inadvertently prevents Buddy and Darling’s escape again when they both try to steal cars in the same parking lot, and Baby rams the couple’s car, an accident that results in Darling being gunned down as she turns her own weapons on the approaching cops again. Buddy blames Baby for her death, and even though both manage to elude the law at last, Baby finds himself outcast and hunted with no-one to turn to but Debora, and finally Doc reveals his truest colours by melting in the face of true love. It’s more than faintly amazing to me that Wright manages to get such an effective lead performance out of Elgort, who had seemed like the biggest hunk of white dough not yet even baked in the first couple of parts I saw him, whilst the rest of the cast about him delivers superlative work, particularly Foxx in all his character’s supine aggression and Gonzalez as a pocket full of crazy, plus Hamm finally unleashing that long-suppressed edge of the maniacal he constantly hinted but kept buttoned down in his Mad Men days.
.

.
It would be fair to say that Baby Driver starts to run out of ideas in its last twenty minutes, and like The World’s End it betrays Wright’s uncertainty about where exactly to draw a line with his narratives, as he insists on following through to a coda that eventually delivers a happy ending after making Baby (whose real name is finally revealed) jump through hoops of law and prison. And yet the finale proper manages to build up such a note of frenetic, maniacal confrontation that subsequent hesitations don’t matter too much. Buddy and Baby battle in an increasingly pathological manner, Hamm’s glowering visage of vengeance bathed in red light, lethal blue stare glaring through shattered glass and flecks of water. Although still nominally in noir-action territory, Wright’s staging here is reminiscent in its colouring and plumes of steam and smoke of sci-fi works, including THX 1138 (1971) and Aliens (1986), whilst also reminding me of a near-forgotten film, Metal Skin (1994), the ill-fated second feature of Romper Stomper director Geoffrey Wright, which similarly resolved its tale of freedom-seeking hotrodders in increasingly gladiatorial surrounds. Although villain is defeated and heroes left to lick their wounds and find a future, Wright delivers a moment of exacting and totemic punishment, as Buddy robs Baby of his hearing by shooting off his gun on either side of his head. This cruel exacting recalls some of the film’s less noted antecedents, particularly two other tales young hotshots going up against the world only to pay a harsh price in physical coin, Marlon Brando’s One Eyed Jacks (1960) and Robert Rossen’s The Hustler (1961). Here, in this vision of youth and age in conflict and the spectacle of losing something you love but learning how to live with it, Wright signals that he might be finding his way through to a new maturity with more elegance than he managed with The World’s End. But it’s finally most apt that Wright’s final image returns to fantasy realised as a reunited Baby and Debora drive off in a roadster, pop cinema and pop music rediscovering their place of birth, out on some dusty southern back road. It might not prove the best film of the year, and yet Baby Driver left me with the feeling that it might well be the only one they’ll be teaching in film schools in twenty years.