Baby Driver

It was Jesse Wallace who once expressed his desire to write a novel taking place in the space of a pop song. And while “Baby Driver” may not fit into the space of a single pop song, writer/director Edgar Wright manages to squeeze it into the space of a playlist, an iPod playlist, that is, belonging to the titular character, the uniquely monikered Baby (Ansel Elgort), a youthful robbery getaway driver. Tinnitus in his ear means he listens to music almost constantly as a countermeasure to the non-stop hum. In the planning of a bank heist, the intimidating Bats (Jamie Foxx) demands to know if this apple faced wheelman, given his omnipresent earbuds, even heard the plan. Baby did and recites the scheme word for word, a comical moment but also a telling one – pop music is Baby’s pulse, like when he goes for coffee and the beat in his head (“Harlem Shuffle” by Bob & Earl) becomes indistinguishable from the world around him. And when music is fundamental to “Baby Driver” rather than ancillary is when the movie is best too.

The opening scene, in which Baby transports a triad of bank robbers to safety, sets the tone, a crazy car chase that is freshened up by how Wright and his editors, Jonathan Amos and Paul Machliss, cut to the rhythm of “Bellbottoms” by The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, where each swerve and skid feels in service to the song rather than the other way around, like the car chase itself is just providing harmony. In a later gun battle, the pop of each firearm syncopates with the song on the soundtrack. It is not only something akin to the bullet ballet of John Woo’s Hong Kong gun fu opuses taking place in the same universe as “La La Land”, but a rare moment, I suspect, when NRA members and liberal art lovers can come together.

Wright has made a career of not so much parodying genres he likes as inhabiting them to their core and then giving them, successfully or not, their own stylish spin. So in “Baby Driver” he hitches his wagon to the heist movie, with Baby indebted to a vaguely defined crime kingpin called Doc (Kevin Spacey) who pairs his driver with a revolving motley crew that sometimes includes Bats, but sometimes also includes Buddy (Jon Hamm) and Darling (Eiza González). Baby, of course, goes in for one last job, which turns out not to be a last job, which fuels his desire for escape with Debora (Lilly James), the idealized diner waitress with no backstory because she is a mere apparition, existing to give the principal male something to fight for.

Their relationship is intended as pivotal, and while it is crisply played by both James and Engort, the kinetic editing here does a disservice, chopping up potential character building moments into mere bursts of more moviemaking style. What’s worse, the situation into which Wright places them and the dialogue he gives them to recite never really gets at the idea of their age. They come across less like two kids in strangely adult situations desperate to recapture their lost youth than the two kids in “Airplane!” masquerading as adults, attempting to Escape Their Circumstances, just as the bank robbing storyline turns on a Big Job That Goes Wrong and The Bad Guy Who Cannot Be Killed. There is rarely any kind of enthusiastic amplification of these genre machinations for which Wright typically strives, like the moment in “Shaun of the Dead” when Lucy Davis gives the informative speech on How To Walk Like A Zombie, never mind the climactic blowup of “Hot Fuzz.”

The one performer here who truly transcends the material is Jamie Foxx. A conventional Loose Cannon, Foxx nevertheless injects gusts of life into the part, displaying an aptitude for sizing people up and exuding such convincing menace that Baby still comes across in genuine danger even in scenes where, per movie custom, we are conditioned to know he is not. In other words, Foxx inhabits the archetype and then deepens it, which is what “Baby Driver” itself only manages to do when music is at the forefront of the film, and the further the film goes, the less that applies. This is crystallized in the mixtapes Baby makes by recording everyday sounds and words on a vintage cassette recorder and then blending them into quotidian hip hop songs. It’s tempting to read this as a metaphor for “Baby Driver” as a remix of heist movies, but those mix tapes, so intriguing on their own, ultimately exist only as a means for blackmail later by Doc, emblemizing the way in which the longer the movie goes, the more Wright turns the story up in the mix and takes the music back. By the time it ended, I was ready to skip to the next track.

The World's End

Putting it delicately so as to avoid revealing precise context, our ostensible heroes find themselves in one of those familiar cinematic situations where everyone around them is not necessarily what they seem and so now our ostensible heroes are worried even they might not be what they seem. How to prove to each other they are legit? Simple, they will show their scars. An arm, a leg, a chest, any old war wound will do, so long as it’s acquired from way back when. This scene is about our heroes re-proving their identities for safety’s sake, sure, but more than that it’s about our heroes re-connecting with their past and re-affirming their one true selves. They might not be re-connecting and re-affirming willingly, but it’s happening all the same.

“The World’s End”, director Edgar Wright’s final entry into his so-called Cornetto Trilogy, is both not as great as its predecessors, “Shaun of the Dead” and “Hot Fuzz”, and greater. It does not toy with its genre conventions – in this case, apocalyptic – with quite the same relentlessly gleeful abandon but it does strive, as I suppose all trilogy concluders should, for something more humanistic and profound, even if in the end Wright cannot help but twist the satirical knife one last time.

Its driving plot point is a pub crawl initiated and captained by Gary King (Simon Pegg, co-writer with Wright) once the coolest kid in the tony English suburb of Newton Haven and now looking at 40 with a life of unfulfilled promise behind him. Well, maybe not promise. Maybe he never had much promise. Maybe he’s just unfulfilled. Alas, for Gary it seems fulfillment can only be found in the bottom of a pint (Wright makes the pouring of a pint so poetic and traumatizing at once) and so he determines to re-tackle the famed Golden Mile. This is the notorious crawl of twelve pubs in Newton Haven finishing up at the aptly named World’s End. At 17 Gary and his four best friends failed in this quest. Thus, he tells a few white lies to re-unite them and off they go.

The four friends (Nick Frost, Paddy Considine, Martin Freeman, Eddie Marsan) have all moved on to varying degrees of responsibility and happiness and sadness – marriages, divorces, kids, white collars. Wright admirably does not portray these corporate lifestyles as quite the hammered-home no-win drudgery they usually are in film, but nor does he portray them as rosy content. They have matured and grown up, but they have also come face-to-face with the everyday abyss. The older you get the more you realize this pub looks exactly like the last pub and that the next pub will probably look exactly like this pub and even if you have nobly chosen to trade in ale for tap water this knowledge can be enough to momentarily make you lose the will to abstain and down a tray of shots all on your lonesome.

None of this is to suggest that Gary King’s extended adolescence is heroic. He is our hero in that sense that he is the main character. Other than that his drinking problem is immense, his selfishness is staggering, his stasis is depressing. When he spies the requisite girl that got away (Rosamund Pike) he simply assumes she must want to pick up right where they left off (in the disabled stall) as randy teenagers. Aside from the mileage on his face he is the same person he was at 17, and so “The World’s End” finds our disgruntled quintet in that scary no-man’s-land directly between their current selves and their past selves. The fate of their future selves might be at stake.

And the future of the world. Wright does virtually nothing in accordance with standard cinematic procedure to foreshadow the twists and turns to come (and that shall not be revealed). Rather he allows the set-up itself, returning to a hometown that has become unfamiliar, foretell the trouble awaiting the prodigal sons that no one seems to recognize. Gary and his very own sisters of mercy will find their lives changed in the course of having to fight for them.

Ultimately that might be Wright’s slyest dig. The end would suggest a rejection of complacency and an acceptance of the human race as a pitiable but good-hearted band of screw-ups; that we would rather wallow in an authentic darkness than succeed in a phony light. Of course, to reach this point Gary has to decide which takes precedence – what he wants or what the rest of the world wants.

Cinematic cataclysm so often exists to spur our protagonist forward, and the film plays straight to this idea. One man’s ultimate insight is another man’s world’s end.