WARNING: SPOILERS PRESENT THROUGHOUT THE WHOLE PIECE.
Edgar Wright is a fan of many genres. Every one of his films has included a heavy dose of nods, references, homages, and influences of previous classic films of a particular genre. Baby Driver is no different, lifting heavily from the heist/car chase repertoire. What makes it stand out, however, is the way it utilizes the soundtrack.
It's not quite accurate to call the film a musical, although it's easy to see why some have jokingly done so. It isn't even a movie about music, a la La La Land. Rather, the music drives everything, from the story pacing to the character beats, and especially the action. Everything is meticulously synced up to the soundtrack. We've seen this before from Wright. You can find little examples of this in prior works. Shaun of the Dead's scene in the Winchester pub, beating the zombie bartender to Queen's "Don't Stop Me Now" is a perfect example. In hindsight, that gag almost seems like practice for Baby Driver, which utilizes everything from gun shots to money being flipped through to car doors slamming in rhythm to the music. We can also look at Scott Pilgrim versus the World as a warm up, seeing as how that film had music central to the plot, characters, and action as well.
Overall, Baby Driver might lack the same amount of depth and number of layers that the perfectly crafted Three Flavours Cornetto trilogy had (especially The World's End), but it is very much as well structured. Wright is a master at setting everything up. It's little things, like Baby's ability to quickly memorize song lyrics and heist plans, which pays off in one of the most perfectly executed jokes in the third act. It's the scene about the bull on television coming back to apply to one of the characters. It's neat little side details, like the whole bit about how the "moment you catch feelings, you catch a bullet," paying off with Doc getting shot within minutes of deciding to help Baby (the first time he displays anything resembling human emotion).
It's also more interesting or significant things. Wright sets up the fallout with Buddy in a clever fashion that pays off with a genuine "twist" of sorts. Buddy seems to be one of the crew at the start that likes Baby, going so much as to share his earbuds, listening to "Brighton Rock" by Queen and being friendly with his driver. By the end, the actions are similar, but everything has been reversed. When he shares Baby's earbuds again, listening this time to Barry White, it is as an enemy. "Brighton Rock" comes back for the final showdown. Nothing gets thrown away. Even the name "Buddy" should have been an indicator. Wright loves playing around with character names as plot clues. By naming a character "Buddy," he is essentially subverting his own trope, which helps keep things fresh, unpredictable, and exciting.
This is the kind of stuff that makes me love Edgar Wright. His works have trained me to watch films in a very different way than I would, say, a Marvel Studios flick. I'm always paying attention. If it weren't Wright, I likely wouldn't have noticed things like the police lights colored clothing in every single washing machine at the laundromat while Baby and Debora were on their date. It serves as a subtle reminder to the audience that despite Baby's best efforts to get out of the heist business, he's still ultimately a criminal and can be discovered and arrested at any point. He might think he's out of the game, but he'll always be a fugitive.
References and subtle connections require a bit more obsessive diving into because of the soundtrack component as well. For the most part, I've been able to pick up on so many little things in his films just by watching them a bunch, whether it's the names of characters pertaining to their fate in Hot Fuzz or the Jackie Chan reference in the drunken action of The World's End. Here, I feel like I have to dive into the soundtrack as well. Doing so highlights the solid nature of the "B-a-b-y baby" repetition correlating to the song, or just how perfectly each song is selected. There are the obvious ones, like "Never, Never Gonna Give You Up" by Barry White, with the line being sung over by Buddy, "I'm never gonna quit. Quitting just ain't my stick." A bit on the nose, sure, but there are many examples of this made more clear by really digging deep into the soundtrack. He's careful to make sure you get it just by watching, of course, but there is enough there that for those who want to obsess over it, there's a bit more material to dig into.
Wright also loves to structure his films almost like visual essays. In pretty much every one of his films, the entire plot is explained in a manner of a few sentences by some character. Ed details everything that is about to happen in Shaun of the Dead while they're drinking in the Winchester post-break up. In Hot Fuzz, Danny basically describes every action that will happen in the end while bugging Nicholas Angel about action movies. None were as clearly stated as in The World's End. It isn't obvious until you re-watch the film, but the entire opening backstory literally spells out the entire plot of it. The same thing happens here. It comes from the briefly featured Griff, who essentially lays out Baby's character arc outright. It's one of those characteristics of Wright's films that train his fans to watch a bit more actively. People want to catch that stuff, but it's often so well woven into the fabric of the dialogue and acting that it can be difficult to suss out what is the "introductory paragraph" of the movie.
Baby Driver also stands out for somewhat similar reasons as Mad Max: Fury Road did: practical effects. In an age where relying on CGI cars for the "crazy stunts" is pretty common, these two films relied on stunt drivers. The rules are pretty clear because they abide by actual, real-world physics. (Mad Max: Fury Road occasionally embellishes this through CGI, but it's still centered around real vehicles doing real stunts.) When you see a car in Baby Driver drift, it's actually doing so in a manner that is possible. That reality-driven action gives everything more weight and makes it more exciting. Watching cars parachute out of an airplane is fun and all, but it's not nearly as exciting as watching one pick up truck push another underneath a tractor trailer before swerving out of it. Wright has always had a good sense of action, building things off of practical stunts and effects, and knowing when and how to properly embellish or utilize CGI. Scott Pilgrim actually used a lot of real stunt work as well, but was cleverly masked by the super stylized look of the comic book/video game nature of that world.
Even more, Wright really lets the audience do some of the work. Sometimes he resorts to cliche exposition dumps, although usually as it is a trope of the genre he's taking from. On the most part, though, he lets a lot of little details go unexplained. Baby Driver probably does that more than any of his past works. We get little hints of backstory or character revelations without having things spelled out in full. Was Bats right about Buddy and Darling? We don't know, but it isn't hard to imagine he is. Then there's the whole reversal of Doc, who reveals a ton just by saying one line of dialogue. "I was in love once," is all he says, and it explains so much without going into detail.
There's a ton of subtle stuff in there. Consider the scene in which Baby pulls out a pink and glittery iPod to play the song "Debora." They don't spell it out, but one gets the idea that he has never actually bought an iPod of his own. His died in the car crash with his parents. Rather, he has inherited iPods from the cars he stole as a younger boy. Those iPods aren't his, which explains why his playlist can go from the John Spencer Blues Explosion to Carla Thomas to Jonathan Richman & the Modern Lovers to the Damned to Queen to Young MC. He buys music, sure. His record collection probably stacks up with anyone else's in Brooklyn or the Pioneer Valley! But he's generally learning about new music through jacking cars (which is why he didn't know the band was T. Rex and not "trex").
It also applies to character traits. Griff pretty much hits the nail on the head when he describes Baby as someone who thinks he's better than the others. Constantly donning headphones and sunglasses, it's an attempt to place himself outside the goings-on of the thieves themselves. A young man, he clearly thinks of himself as more righteous and innocent, trying to create a mental wall between himself and the "real criminals." Ear buds in and shades on, he almost never seems to respond to anything. He is trying to tune out as a means of emotionally distancing himself.
We can see that change after his heist with Bats, when things start getting more violent and uncomfortable for him. When Bats goes in for some gum, he overhears Buddy and Darling talk about killing Bats like Buddy killed someone else. Baby doesn't have headphones or sunglasses at this point, and we can see him wince. At this point, he cannot continue to separate himself from the others. There's nothing to block out this world around him anymore, and it clearly impacts him, being a decent human being and all.
Of course, none of this happens without consequences. While Buddy is wrong about what exactly "facing the music" means when he threatens Baby, our protagonist does suffer consequences. He ultimately is arrested and spends several years in prison before getting the chance to live the life he actually wants. Griff was right that Baby can't wash his hands in the sink, and he was right that he'd eventually have blood on them! Yet he is able to eventually shed that life through his time in the clink. While in prison, there are even a couple of shots of him washing cars or mopping the floor. He is literally cleaning something while metaphorically scrubbing his past away. That he does get a harsh sentence initially and is able to get out in a reasonable amount of time gives us even more reason to cheer on our hero. There is the philosophical debate to be had about the ethics of doing bad things to horrible people doing worse things to others, but Baby further earns his happy ending by surrendering and doing his time. He faces the music, showing that he is a more morally upstanding person than the other crew members, who all died rather than give up their way of life.
And then, of course, there is the technical side of things. Wright builds off of things we have also seen previously in Shaun of the Dead when we see that early, complex, impressively choreographed and lengthy one-shot. If it's not longer than Shaun's trip to the corner store, it's certainly more insane! The amount of stuff happening in the sequence is mind-boggling. He does another one-shot that starts near the ground level as Baby enters his home building, then the crane lifts up three floors and waits from him to rush up those three stories and enter his apartment. There are a number of rotating shots and other angles that make Baby Driver a interesting film to watch on a technical basis.
Unique, well-structured, brilliantly paced and acted, Baby Driver is absolutely one of the best films of the year. Edgar Wright hasn't exactly had an amazing track record at the box office, despite only putting out critically acclaimed and obsessively adored films. (His previous four films are rated 92%, 91%, 81%, and 89% respectively on Rotten Tomatoes, yet they grossed $13, $23, $31, and $26 million at the box office. Respectable, given that Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, and The World's End all grossed more than their budgets, but Scott Pilgrim vs. the World only earned back about half its budget.) For such well regarded films, Wright hasn't quite been able to break into the mainstream. (Still cursing Marvel Studios for not giving us the Edgar Wright vision of Ant-Man we so very much deserved.)
While I'm not sure Baby Driver is better than The World's End, a film that is so much more layered and thematically substantial, it's very much at home in Wright's resume. It stands out a bit more because of how well everything is synced to the music. Sony Pictures seems to think they have a chance for a bit of a hit on their hands. They've really made a huge marketing campaign, with commercials and billboards all over the place (certainly, it's the most advertised Edgar Wright film to date). They also pushed the released date up several weeks to release in time for the 4th of July holiday weekend.
As a long time fan of Wright, it's always a bit tricky to see his films individually, and not retrospectively examine where it fits in with his previous films. There's a lot of Baby Driver that you can trace back to Shaun of the Dead or Scott Pilgrim. It makes sense he gravitated towards the later when you hear him talk about how he had the idea for his current feature for over two decades. While not thematically connected to any of those films (outside maybe the basic plot point of someone having to take responsibility for their life), each seems to build up to this. It's absolutely worth going back and watching all of them, then re-watching Baby Driver as well. Many might deride Wright's flicks as being too much of genre flicks, but they're so smart and well-crafted, even non-fans of the genre can appreciate them. I'm sure I'll see the film many more times and develop more thoughts on it.
The bottom line is that these are the kinds of films Hollywood studios need to invest more into now: unique ideas and original properties from writer/directors with a clear creative decision (that doesn't come from the studio itself for the sake of franchising) that trains the audience to be more active viewers, treating them as intelligent beings capable of interpreting things and not needing too much hand-holding. They aren't as lucrative as the mindless, thematically underwhelming world-building exercises that, say, Marvel Studios puts out, but something like Baby Driver really stands out as something entirely fresh and almost a revelation. These are the films that make people want to become filmmakers themselves.
And, oh yeah, good luck if you try to resist buying the soundtrack.
REDUCTIVE RATING: Possibly my favorite film of the year, or really, since Mad Max: Fury Road.
Overall, Baby Driver might lack the same amount of depth and number of layers that the perfectly crafted Three Flavours Cornetto trilogy had (especially The World's End), but it is very much as well structured. Wright is a master at setting everything up. It's little things, like Baby's ability to quickly memorize song lyrics and heist plans, which pays off in one of the most perfectly executed jokes in the third act. It's the scene about the bull on television coming back to apply to one of the characters. It's neat little side details, like the whole bit about how the "moment you catch feelings, you catch a bullet," paying off with Doc getting shot within minutes of deciding to help Baby (the first time he displays anything resembling human emotion).
It's also more interesting or significant things. Wright sets up the fallout with Buddy in a clever fashion that pays off with a genuine "twist" of sorts. Buddy seems to be one of the crew at the start that likes Baby, going so much as to share his earbuds, listening to "Brighton Rock" by Queen and being friendly with his driver. By the end, the actions are similar, but everything has been reversed. When he shares Baby's earbuds again, listening this time to Barry White, it is as an enemy. "Brighton Rock" comes back for the final showdown. Nothing gets thrown away. Even the name "Buddy" should have been an indicator. Wright loves playing around with character names as plot clues. By naming a character "Buddy," he is essentially subverting his own trope, which helps keep things fresh, unpredictable, and exciting.
This is the kind of stuff that makes me love Edgar Wright. His works have trained me to watch films in a very different way than I would, say, a Marvel Studios flick. I'm always paying attention. If it weren't Wright, I likely wouldn't have noticed things like the police lights colored clothing in every single washing machine at the laundromat while Baby and Debora were on their date. It serves as a subtle reminder to the audience that despite Baby's best efforts to get out of the heist business, he's still ultimately a criminal and can be discovered and arrested at any point. He might think he's out of the game, but he'll always be a fugitive.
References and subtle connections require a bit more obsessive diving into because of the soundtrack component as well. For the most part, I've been able to pick up on so many little things in his films just by watching them a bunch, whether it's the names of characters pertaining to their fate in Hot Fuzz or the Jackie Chan reference in the drunken action of The World's End. Here, I feel like I have to dive into the soundtrack as well. Doing so highlights the solid nature of the "B-a-b-y baby" repetition correlating to the song, or just how perfectly each song is selected. There are the obvious ones, like "Never, Never Gonna Give You Up" by Barry White, with the line being sung over by Buddy, "I'm never gonna quit. Quitting just ain't my stick." A bit on the nose, sure, but there are many examples of this made more clear by really digging deep into the soundtrack. He's careful to make sure you get it just by watching, of course, but there is enough there that for those who want to obsess over it, there's a bit more material to dig into.
Wright also loves to structure his films almost like visual essays. In pretty much every one of his films, the entire plot is explained in a manner of a few sentences by some character. Ed details everything that is about to happen in Shaun of the Dead while they're drinking in the Winchester post-break up. In Hot Fuzz, Danny basically describes every action that will happen in the end while bugging Nicholas Angel about action movies. None were as clearly stated as in The World's End. It isn't obvious until you re-watch the film, but the entire opening backstory literally spells out the entire plot of it. The same thing happens here. It comes from the briefly featured Griff, who essentially lays out Baby's character arc outright. It's one of those characteristics of Wright's films that train his fans to watch a bit more actively. People want to catch that stuff, but it's often so well woven into the fabric of the dialogue and acting that it can be difficult to suss out what is the "introductory paragraph" of the movie.
Baby Driver also stands out for somewhat similar reasons as Mad Max: Fury Road did: practical effects. In an age where relying on CGI cars for the "crazy stunts" is pretty common, these two films relied on stunt drivers. The rules are pretty clear because they abide by actual, real-world physics. (Mad Max: Fury Road occasionally embellishes this through CGI, but it's still centered around real vehicles doing real stunts.) When you see a car in Baby Driver drift, it's actually doing so in a manner that is possible. That reality-driven action gives everything more weight and makes it more exciting. Watching cars parachute out of an airplane is fun and all, but it's not nearly as exciting as watching one pick up truck push another underneath a tractor trailer before swerving out of it. Wright has always had a good sense of action, building things off of practical stunts and effects, and knowing when and how to properly embellish or utilize CGI. Scott Pilgrim actually used a lot of real stunt work as well, but was cleverly masked by the super stylized look of the comic book/video game nature of that world.
Even more, Wright really lets the audience do some of the work. Sometimes he resorts to cliche exposition dumps, although usually as it is a trope of the genre he's taking from. On the most part, though, he lets a lot of little details go unexplained. Baby Driver probably does that more than any of his past works. We get little hints of backstory or character revelations without having things spelled out in full. Was Bats right about Buddy and Darling? We don't know, but it isn't hard to imagine he is. Then there's the whole reversal of Doc, who reveals a ton just by saying one line of dialogue. "I was in love once," is all he says, and it explains so much without going into detail.
There's a ton of subtle stuff in there. Consider the scene in which Baby pulls out a pink and glittery iPod to play the song "Debora." They don't spell it out, but one gets the idea that he has never actually bought an iPod of his own. His died in the car crash with his parents. Rather, he has inherited iPods from the cars he stole as a younger boy. Those iPods aren't his, which explains why his playlist can go from the John Spencer Blues Explosion to Carla Thomas to Jonathan Richman & the Modern Lovers to the Damned to Queen to Young MC. He buys music, sure. His record collection probably stacks up with anyone else's in Brooklyn or the Pioneer Valley! But he's generally learning about new music through jacking cars (which is why he didn't know the band was T. Rex and not "trex").
It also applies to character traits. Griff pretty much hits the nail on the head when he describes Baby as someone who thinks he's better than the others. Constantly donning headphones and sunglasses, it's an attempt to place himself outside the goings-on of the thieves themselves. A young man, he clearly thinks of himself as more righteous and innocent, trying to create a mental wall between himself and the "real criminals." Ear buds in and shades on, he almost never seems to respond to anything. He is trying to tune out as a means of emotionally distancing himself.
We can see that change after his heist with Bats, when things start getting more violent and uncomfortable for him. When Bats goes in for some gum, he overhears Buddy and Darling talk about killing Bats like Buddy killed someone else. Baby doesn't have headphones or sunglasses at this point, and we can see him wince. At this point, he cannot continue to separate himself from the others. There's nothing to block out this world around him anymore, and it clearly impacts him, being a decent human being and all.
Of course, none of this happens without consequences. While Buddy is wrong about what exactly "facing the music" means when he threatens Baby, our protagonist does suffer consequences. He ultimately is arrested and spends several years in prison before getting the chance to live the life he actually wants. Griff was right that Baby can't wash his hands in the sink, and he was right that he'd eventually have blood on them! Yet he is able to eventually shed that life through his time in the clink. While in prison, there are even a couple of shots of him washing cars or mopping the floor. He is literally cleaning something while metaphorically scrubbing his past away. That he does get a harsh sentence initially and is able to get out in a reasonable amount of time gives us even more reason to cheer on our hero. There is the philosophical debate to be had about the ethics of doing bad things to horrible people doing worse things to others, but Baby further earns his happy ending by surrendering and doing his time. He faces the music, showing that he is a more morally upstanding person than the other crew members, who all died rather than give up their way of life.
And then, of course, there is the technical side of things. Wright builds off of things we have also seen previously in Shaun of the Dead when we see that early, complex, impressively choreographed and lengthy one-shot. If it's not longer than Shaun's trip to the corner store, it's certainly more insane! The amount of stuff happening in the sequence is mind-boggling. He does another one-shot that starts near the ground level as Baby enters his home building, then the crane lifts up three floors and waits from him to rush up those three stories and enter his apartment. There are a number of rotating shots and other angles that make Baby Driver a interesting film to watch on a technical basis.
Unique, well-structured, brilliantly paced and acted, Baby Driver is absolutely one of the best films of the year. Edgar Wright hasn't exactly had an amazing track record at the box office, despite only putting out critically acclaimed and obsessively adored films. (His previous four films are rated 92%, 91%, 81%, and 89% respectively on Rotten Tomatoes, yet they grossed $13, $23, $31, and $26 million at the box office. Respectable, given that Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, and The World's End all grossed more than their budgets, but Scott Pilgrim vs. the World only earned back about half its budget.) For such well regarded films, Wright hasn't quite been able to break into the mainstream. (Still cursing Marvel Studios for not giving us the Edgar Wright vision of Ant-Man we so very much deserved.)
While I'm not sure Baby Driver is better than The World's End, a film that is so much more layered and thematically substantial, it's very much at home in Wright's resume. It stands out a bit more because of how well everything is synced to the music. Sony Pictures seems to think they have a chance for a bit of a hit on their hands. They've really made a huge marketing campaign, with commercials and billboards all over the place (certainly, it's the most advertised Edgar Wright film to date). They also pushed the released date up several weeks to release in time for the 4th of July holiday weekend.
As a long time fan of Wright, it's always a bit tricky to see his films individually, and not retrospectively examine where it fits in with his previous films. There's a lot of Baby Driver that you can trace back to Shaun of the Dead or Scott Pilgrim. It makes sense he gravitated towards the later when you hear him talk about how he had the idea for his current feature for over two decades. While not thematically connected to any of those films (outside maybe the basic plot point of someone having to take responsibility for their life), each seems to build up to this. It's absolutely worth going back and watching all of them, then re-watching Baby Driver as well. Many might deride Wright's flicks as being too much of genre flicks, but they're so smart and well-crafted, even non-fans of the genre can appreciate them. I'm sure I'll see the film many more times and develop more thoughts on it.
The bottom line is that these are the kinds of films Hollywood studios need to invest more into now: unique ideas and original properties from writer/directors with a clear creative decision (that doesn't come from the studio itself for the sake of franchising) that trains the audience to be more active viewers, treating them as intelligent beings capable of interpreting things and not needing too much hand-holding. They aren't as lucrative as the mindless, thematically underwhelming world-building exercises that, say, Marvel Studios puts out, but something like Baby Driver really stands out as something entirely fresh and almost a revelation. These are the films that make people want to become filmmakers themselves.
And, oh yeah, good luck if you try to resist buying the soundtrack.
REDUCTIVE RATING: Possibly my favorite film of the year, or really, since Mad Max: Fury Road.
No comments:
Post a Comment