Seeking out the
5000 greatest films
in a century of cinema
Driving Miss Daisy
Produced by Richard D. Zanuck and Lili Fini Zanuck
Screenplay by Alfred Uhry Based on the play by Alfred Uhry
Editing: Mark Warner
Music: Hans Zimmer
Release Date: 26 January 1990
Aspect Ratio: 1.85 : 1
Color: Color
1989’s
Best Picture Oscar winner was hardly the best movie of that year (it doesn’t
even crack my top 25) but it’s still a fine film with a terrific cast made by a
great director from a Pulitzer Prize-winning play. The gentle, tender story
covers the twenty-five-year relationship between a wealthy, strong-willed,
Southern Jewish lady (Jessica Tandy) and her unassailable Black chauffeur
(Morgan Freeman). The play is the first in a series by Alfred Uhry that came to
be known as his "Atlanta Trilogy.” These theatrical works all center on
Jewish characters dealing with the changing face of race relations in Atlanta,
Georgia during the first half of the 20th century.
Adapting his three-character play, usually performed on a bare stage with just
two chairs to simulate a car, Uhry opens up his story with a lot of period
detail and memorable characters added into the screenplay. At the helm of the
picture is the great Australian director Bruce Beresford (Breaker
Morant, Tender Mercies, Crimes of the Heart). While hardly the highpoint of
this filmmaker’s career, he handles the potentially schmaltzy material well,
and the movie’s big Oscar wins—for Best Picture, Actress, Adapted Screenplay,
and Make-Up, along with it's four other nominations—enabled the green light for
Beresford’s next project, Black Robe, which is the type of
spectacularly uncommercial movie that only gets made after a filmmaker collects
the kind of awards capitol this movie provided.
The way Driving Miss Daisy depicts the passage
of time is lovely. No titles or music cues signify the advancing of years, they
just roll by and we subtly register that things have progressed via subtle
changes in make-up, wardrobe, and the way the characters interact with each
other. Morgan Freeman and Jessica Tandy both give wonderfully understated performances,
and Dan Aykroyd delivers an excellent supporting turn as Miss Daisy’s son
Boolie. The playful synthesizer score by Hans Zimmer (My Beautiful Laundrette, The Last Emperor, Rain Man) is one of
those wonderful soundtracks whose instrumentation may be totally out of time
with its film’s period but feels perfectly in step with the central character
and overall vibe of the story.