Baby Driver is filmic synaesthesia – a film with sexy car chases whose songs are mined for beats to correspond to and coincide with their on-screen counterparts.
USA
3.5*
Director:
Edgar Wright
Screenwriter:
Edgar Wright
Director of Photography:
Bill Pope
Running time: 115 minutes
It’s called synaesthesia: that kind of marriage between image and sound. Not in a poetic but in a very palpable sense. It’s when the movement inside the images seems to be choreographed to or even reflect the music being played on the often non-diegetic soundtrack. The most famous example is Mickey Mouse, the apprentice, commanding the magical broomstick to carry heavy buckets of water to the beat of Paul Dukas’s “L’apprenti sorcier” in Fantasia’s “Sorcerer’s Apprentice” episode. The movements on-screen correspond to the music’s rhythm on the soundtrack to create the impression of symbiotic unity and underline both the artistic aspirations of the staging and the feeling that everything “belongs together”.
This same approach informs the entirety of Edgar Wright’s Baby Driver, and as a side note, it is noteworthy that the screenplay itself was prefaced by the instruction that “Every scene in this film [be] driven by music”. This technique is most clearly on display in the post–opening credits scene: In what appears to be an unbroken take (although the complete lack of a camera reflection in shop windows exposes the influence of visual effects), the titular getaway driver, Baby (Ansel Elgort), walks the streets of Atlanta while his Classic iPod pumps Bob & Earl’s “Harlem Shuffle” into his ears and onto the soundtrack. All the while, we notice words from the song sporadically but physically appear embedded in the environment at exactly the moment we hear them. Later on, the songs will gel with the movements of a car in a chase or even the shooting of a bullet to form a whole and prevent us from figuring out whether sound or image orientates the composition of the other.
The film is ostensibly a 2017 interpretation of Jean-Luc Godard’s famous maxim that “All you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun” (« Tout ce dont vous avez besoin pour faire un film, c’est d’une fille et d’un flingue »), but one that is set to rapturous music instead of half-baked philosophical voice-overs. Also, the opening car chase that serves as the film’s ignition spark is one of the most thrilling in a very long time.
The girl is Debora (Lily James), a waitress at Bo’s Diner, an establishment that Baby, her own beau-in-waiting, visits on a regular basis. When Baby hears her sing his name – as part of Carla Thomas’s “B-A-B-Y” – he is immediately smitten. He is deeply involved in the world of the gun, although just like Ray Liotta’s Henry Hill character in GoodFellas, we never see him pull a trigger, which sets him apart from the rest of the gang and endears him to us. He works as a getaway driver for “Doc” (Kevin Spacey), a shadowy loner who hires freelancers to take part in heists he plans out in great detail. Baby has been on the payroll since he was barely a teenager and is the only constant in the ever-revolving teams that Doc puts together.
Baby Driver, not unlike American Graffiti, is a musical without being a musical: It is inextricably linked to its music, and luckily it is the cars that dance and not the characters. Actions are arranged by both the lyrics and the sounds, as Baby slams the brakes when we hear The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion yell “I’m gonna break!”, while traffic light changes or gunshots are orchestrated to visually underscore a particular musical beat.
But for all the clever gimmicks it deploys to slot the world of the ear into the world of the eye, the film fails to grab us by the throat or crawl into our heart. Sure, the back story with Baby’s mother is pretty sad, but Debora’s character is underdeveloped and left to sulk (admirably, she seems unwilling to do that) alone at the diner once too often. Her interaction with Baby shows chemistry and enormous promise for the future, but there is too little to work with. The plot would have been served better by a proper development of this relationship instead of the addition of an equally flimsy story in the margins involving Baby’s adorable blind godfather.
Furthermore, the final act’s sudden shift in tone, initiated by Baby directly causing the gruesome killing of a dangerous sidekick, is like shifting from fifth back to first gear on the open road. The whiplash is so bad I nearly burst out laughing at the absurdity of the moment. The film keeps up this pace for a full 10 minutes amid a hectic car chase and shoot-out until a horror movie–like “just when you thought the villain was dead, he comes back one last time” climax.
Baby-faced Elgort is well-cast as the odd-man-out whose choice of music, it can be argued, literally saves his life on many an occasion. Director Edgar Wright clearly had fun directing this music video of a film, but Baby Driver’s first two acts are far superior to its third, and while some of the songs on the soundtrack are destined to become tied to their on-screen visualisations, the concatenation of set pieces ultimately sputters to a bizarrely cloying final coda.