 Tagline: The funny, touching and totally irresistible story of a working relationship that became a 25-year friendship. Winner of four Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Driving Miss Daisy motors its way onto Blu-ray for the very first time. Now beautifully remastered in stunning high definition, Driving Miss Daisy was adapted by Alfred Uhry from his Pulitzer Prize-winning play. It's the story of a stubborn Southern matron (Jessica Tandy in an Oscar-winning performance) and her patient chauffeur (Academy Award winner Morgan Freeman), two very different individuals who, after a bumpy beginning, forge a lasting friendship that spans 25 years. Storyline: An elderly Jewish widow living in Atlanta can no longer drive. Her son insists she allow him to hire a driver, which in the 1950s meant a black man. She resists any change in her life but, Hoke, the driver is hired by her son. She refuses to allow him to drive her anywhere at first, but Hoke slowly wins her over with his native good graces. The movie is directly taken from a stage play and does show it. It covers over twenty years of the pair's life together as they slowly build a relationship that transcends their differences. Written by John Vogel Reviewer's Note: Reviewed by Michael Reuben on January 10, 2013 -- Driving Miss Daisy belongs to that proud line of best picture winners that no one wanted to make and no one saw coming. It began as an off-Broadway drama by playwright Alfred Uhry, who based it on memories of his prickly Jewish grandmother and the African-American chauffeur who drove her for twenty-five years. The play detailing their evolving relationship was hugely successful and won numerous awards, including a Pulitzer Prize for Uhry, but no studio could imagine it as a movie. Who wanted to see a film about two elderly people talking? Producers Richard and Lili Zanuck (Cocoon) immediately grasped how much more there was to Driving Miss Daisy. Uhry, a native of Atlanta, had been determined to write a play about real people, but he also realized that both of his main characters were, in his words, "out of the loop". Even if Jews were not victims of segregation and overt discrimination in the Georgia of the 1940s and 1950s, they were still considered "different". As much as Miss Daisy might like to pretend otherwise, her constant asides about her daughter-in-law's efforts to fit in with the Christian mainstream tell us that she knows where she stands. The triumph of Uhry's play was to present a window into an entire society through the often seemingly trivial interactions of two people divided by race, gender and social status but ultimately united both by their situation as outsiders and by even deeper forces like age and a sense of history. In Uhry's hands, and with the right actors to speak the lines, arguments over maps, speed limits and bathroom breaks became something else: a demonstration of how society may define our relationships, but the truly stubborn among us don't settle for those definitions. For the movie, Uhry reconceived the entire story, with assistance from director Bruce Beresford. The spare, almost abstract staging became a richly realized, fully populated town, where people who only rated a mention in the stage play became characters in their own right, and styles and fashions evolved before the audience's eyes along with the characters' advancing age. Still, the core of the story remained the deepening relationship between Miss Daisy and her long-suffering chauffeur Hoke, a gentleman at heart, who understood the requirements of survival in the Jim Crow south but also knew, with quiet determination, how to get his way. The film opens simply enough with Miss Daisy Werthan (Jessica Tandy, who won an Oscar for her portrayal) wrecking her car in the driveway. Her son, Boulie (Dan Aykroyd, also Oscar nominated), wants her to have a chauffeur, but his mother doesn't want strangers in her life, even though she can no longer get car insurance. A standoff ensues until Boulie hires Hoke Colburn (Morgan Freeman, also Oscar nominated), telling Hoke that Miss Daisy cannot fire him. At first, Miss Daisy refuses to use Hoke's services, leaving him to pass his days sitting in the kitchen with Idella (Esther Rolle), Daisy's cook and housemaid of many years' standing. ("I wouldn't be in your shoes if the Sweet Lord Jesus come down and asked me himself", Idella tells Hoke.) In his own polite way, though, Hoke proves every bit as stubborn as Miss Daisy. After six days—"same time it took the Lord to make the world", Hoke tells Boulie—Miss Daisy Werthan is riding around town in the back seat of her own car, always below the speed limit, just as she prefers. Over the course of a quarter century, Daisy and Hoke experience many things together, some big, some small: afternoons gardening; visits to the cemetery where Daisy tends her husband's grave; reading lessons; private jokes about Boulie's social-climbing wife, Florine (Patti LuPone); a road trip to Mobile, Alabama, for a family function that occasions several memorable encounters, including a run-in with the state police; the death of a mutual acquaintance; a freak ice storm; the bombing of the Atlanta Temple (a real event from 1958); and the civil rights movement led by Martin Luther King, Jr. All of these experiences are filtered through the uniquely nuanced relationship that develops between Hoke and Miss Daisy. Both are proud people with deep feelings. But neither is sentimental. One of the film's special pleasures is the greater role that it allows Boulie Werthan to play in the story. Boulie's steadily improving fortunes and those of Werthan Industries (as it comes to be known) are one of the many markers of both the passage of time and the slowly changing attitudes in the south. The Canadian Aykroyd dons Boulie's southern charm so naturally that he seems to have been born to play the part. The scene in which Boulie accepts an award from the Chamber of Commerce with his mother and beaming wife looking on was written expressly for the film and serves as an effective counterpoint to the discouraging incident of the Temple bombing. It also coordinates perfectly with the funny scene in which Hoke ingeniously negotiates with Boulie for a raise. It doesn't require a trophy from the locals movers and shakers to make a good businessman. In a famous line near the end of the film (it was used in the trailer, but stop now if you're exceptionally spoiler-allergic), Miss Daisy says to Hoke: "You're my best friend." When you don't know the context (which I won't describe), the line seems more sentimental than it is, but Tandy's delivery adds unexpected depth, because she makes it clear that the thought is something Miss Daisy has just now realized, to her great surprise. In both the play and the film, the line and the exchange that follow are fully earned because of everything that has led up to them. Neither of these two people could change who they were or the world into which they were born. But within those constraints they shared more of life than either they or anyone else ever expected. Highly recommended. Cast Notes: Morgan Freeman (Hoke Colburn), Jessica Tandy (Daisy Werthan), Dan Aykroyd (Boolie Werthan), Patti LuPone (Florine Werthan [as Patti Lupone]), Esther Rolle (Idella), Joann Havrilla (Miss McClatchey), William Hall Jr. (Oscar), Alvin M. Sugarman (Dr. Weil), Clarice F. Geigerman (Nonie), Muriel Moore (Miriam), Sylvia Kaler (Beulah), Carolyn Gold (Neighbor Lady), Crystal R. Fox (Katie Bell), Bob Hannah (Red Mitchell), Ray McKinnon (Trooper #1). IMDb Rating (07/02/13): 7.4/10 from 43,476 users
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