Driving Miss Daisy

USA 1989

Dir: Bruce Beresford

99 mins

Cast: Morgan Freeman, Jessica Tandy, Dan Aykroyd; based on the stage play by Alfred Uhry

Rating: G - The content is very mild in impact

Driving Miss Daisy, the first movie to win the Best Picture Oscar during the decade of the 1990s, is, at its heart, a buddy film. Although some may see that as degrading something that addresses serious issues (like racism and anti-Semitism in the South during the middle of the 20th century), it’s an accurate representation of what works best about Bruce Beresford’s dramatization of Alfred Uhry’s screenplay (which, in turn, is based on his off-Broadway play). The chemistry evident between Morgan Freeman’s Hoke Colburn and Jessica Tandy’s Daisy Werthan isn’t merely important to the film; it is the film. The believable manner in which these two relate to one another – bound by 25 years together yet divided by skin color, class, and an institutional racism that one sees and the other doesn’t – makes Driving Miss Daisy emotionally rich without going down the road of overt manipulation.

...  Aside from its box office prowess, Driving Miss Daisy was credited with presenting the issue of institutional racism in a fashion that wasn’t too “in your face” for mainstream viewers to resist hearing the message. With a quarter-century-long friendship in the cross-hairs, Driving Miss Daisy tracks the evolution of race and class relations during a tumultuous era.

James Berardinelli, Reel Views

... The movie spans a quarter century in the lives of its two characters, from 1948, when Miss Daisy’s son decides it is time she stop driving herself and employ a chauffeur, to 1973, when two old people acknowledge the bond that has grown up between them. It is an immensely subtle film, in which hardly any of the most important information is carried in the dialogue and in which body language, tone of voice or the look in an eye can be the most important thing in a scene. After so many movies in which shallow and violent people deny their humanity and ours, what a lesson to see a film that looks into the heart.

... Driving Miss Daisy was directed by Bruce Beresford, an Australian whose sensibilities seem curiously in tune with the American South. His credits include the superb Tender Mercies and Crimes of the Heart, as well as the underrated and overlooked 1986 film about an Aborigine teenager, The Fringe Dwellers. Working from a screenplay by Alfred Uhry, based on Uhry’s play (and on Uhry’s memories of his grandmother and a family chauffeur), Beresford is able to move us, one small step at a time, into the hearts of his characters. He never steps wrong on his way to a luminous final scene in which we are invited to regard one of the most privileged mysteries of life, the moment when two people allow each other to see inside.

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

... Daisy reaches you in all the places it intends to, in part, because Alfred Uhry adapts his, yes, Broadway hit with intelligent restraint, and also because Tandy and Aykroyd make their significant marks. But the movie gets you mainly because Morgan Freeman, who played chauffeur Hoke Colburn in the original stage production (and won his third Obie for it), takes the wheel and drives Daisy all the way home.

... [Jessica Tandy] is as assured and lovely as she's ever been; and Aykroyd, his sensitive pudginess held in place by strained suspenders, plays Tandy's earnest, goofy son with adroit ungainliness, keeping clear of satirical high jinks. He and Tandy, sitting supportively behind Freeman, make this ride more than worth the trip.

Desson Howe, Washington Post