Baby Driver: Jon Hamm doesn’t know Shakespeare

Actually, that should read “Edgar Wright, writer/director of Baby Driver, doesn’t know Shakespeare”, but Big Jon said it in the picture, and who knows Edgar Wright, amirite? But it’s all Edgar’s fault that poor Jon (aka “Buddy”) is stuck with the line “Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou, Romeo?” when it should be “Romeo! Romeo! Wherefore art thou Romeo?” And, therefore, entirely inappropriate for the scene, in which Hamm is seeking to find, and murder, “Romeo”, aka “Baby Driver”, in a parking garage.

It’s inappropriate because, of course, Juliet is not asking “Where are you, Romeo?” No, she’s asking “Why is your name Romeo?” though what she really means is “Why did you have to be a Montague, instead of the scion of some noble family that my family (the Capulets) is not feuding with? Then I could marry you! For what’s in a name?”

Okay, that does require a little unpacking, not to mention some actual knowledge of the play, which, clearly, exceeds Eddie’s grasp.¹

So, if you hadn’t already guessed, I’m not a fan of Baby Driver, despite its 98% “Smash” (“Smash” as in “good”) rating from Rotten Tomatoes, which, I guess, is not infallible. Baby Driver is itself a mannered, misbegotten smash of Bonnie & Clyde, about which I’ve raved, Pulp Fiction, and Blue Velvet, neither of which I thought were worth a pixel.

I went to Baby Driver expecting/hoping for some shallow, bad-ass, R-rated summer entertainment, and the film started off well, with “Baby Driver” (Ansel Elgort) as this sweet, silent bad-ass “driver”, a pretty boy version of Michael J. Pollard’s semi-autistic yet good-natured and ever efficient C. W. Moss. A whole film dedicated to a modern-day C. W! Sounds like fun!²

And so it was for the first fifteen or twenty minutes, Baby rockin’ out on his iPod to some golden oldies while waiting for the grown-ups to finish with their bank-robbin’. Grown-ups, well, they don’t always do things right, so that sirens are wailing even before Baby can pop the clutch³, but that ain’t no matter. We’re in for some serious, serious rubber burnin’, without the sense of moral and aesthetic shame that inevitably comes from watching a Vin Diesel movie.⁴

But after that great beginning, the film starts going sideways. Seems Baby only does his driving because he’s in hock to suavely evil crime lord Kevin Spacey, who may as well be sleep walking for all the nuance he brings to the part. Even worse, Baby takes his hard-earned cash home to his deaf black foster dad Joseph (CJ Jones), who, fortunately, is not Morgan Freeman, though he’s so nobly suffering he may as well be. Baby signs with Joe, and anybody who watches movies knows that anyone who can sign and speak is part angel.

Yeah, this is kitsch on top of kitsch—as a matter of fact, it’s superkitsch—but why stop now? Only sissies quit when they’re ahead. Baby’s creative too! He records what people say, adds some percussion and riffs and turns it all into a sort of “found art”, kind of like an aural Joseph Cornell!

Of course, this idyll has to be busted, though it’s hardly Baby’s fault. He meets this really sweet chick (Lily James as “Deborah”), a chick as sweet as he is, and if you guessed she’d be a waitress, well, you guessed right. Yeah, it’s young love, true love, like a fifties Chevrolet ad come to life, if you know what one of those was.

Oh, and I forgot to tell you, Baby still owes Kev “one more job.” Yes, one more job! You have to hit those clichés on the head, boy! Otherwise, they’ll get away from you!

The gang for the last job includes the seriously bad ass “Bats” (Jamie Foxx), an obviously slumming Jon Hamm,⁵ and his crazy bitch wife “Darling” (Eiza González), a hundred and seven pounds of implausible, gum-poppin’ malevolence. So what could go wrong?

Well, everything, of course. But the twists, the double crosses, and the blow outs just don’t have the bang of the first fifteen minutes. We’re deep in Quentin Tarantino land, with repetitive outbursts of unlikely, mannered violence—though, to be fair, Wright entirely lacks Tarantino’s compulsive sadism, and I mean that entirely as a compliment.

But the real killer for me is not Wright’s stylized violence (Elza blazing away with an Uzi in either hand, for example, which would pretty much guarantee that she couldn’t hit anything),⁶ but his pathetic sentimentality. Very much unlike Tarantino or David Lynch, Wright lacks the nerve to kill off a single sympathetic character. The Baby/Debbie lovey-dovey dialogue is so syrupy that you half wonder if Debbie is setting him up—if the film is setting you up. Is Debbie going to take Baby’s cash and blow his head off as a final twist? Nope. She waits five years for him to get sprung from the federal pen so they can ride off into the sunset together. What a letdown!

Afterwords
Like Tarantino, Wright is seriously into retro cultural references—music, films, etc. That’s because a director’s “world” is limited to old movies. They can’t make contemporary cultural references because no one’s made a movie about that yet. The most egregious occurs when crime boss Spacey tells the gang to pick up some “Michael Myers Halloween masks” for the heist, leading to some confusion. Did he mean “masks of the character Michael Myers in the 1978 Jamie Lee Curtis classic Halloween” or “masks of Michael “Austin Powers” Myers for Halloween”? If you thought that was funny, you probably call Mom’s basement “home”.