Baby Driver (UK-US 2017)

I do realise that my distinct lack of interest in mainstream contemporary Hollywood does mean I miss out on films by a few directors I admire. One of these is Edgar Wright, who I associate with my time spent with the Co-op Society’s Young Filmmaker Festivals. A spaghetti Western made in the West Country I think? I really liked Scott Pilgrim vs. the World in 2010 and I see looking back that I promised to catch his next film, but I failed. Hopefully, I can make good with this one. Reading some of the contemporary reviews, I see that I have missed many of the film references and I don’t know many of the music tracks but I still enjoyed the film.

In very simple terms, if you don’t already know the film, ‘Baby’ is the nickname of a young man (Ansel Elgot) who finds himself in debt to a criminal boss known as ‘Doc’ (Kevin Spacey) who organises bank jobs with hired robbers and Baby acting as a getaway driver, supposedly paying off his debt with each job. Baby is a tall young man who barely speaks but listens to music through earphones all the time, playing tracks from carefully compiled playlists on one of many vintage iPods. He has had tinnitus since childhood and uses the music to block it out. As a small child he witnessed his parents’ death in a car crash that he survived. He grew up with a deaf foster father and as a result Baby can lipread and sign. He became fascinated with music and now creates ‘mixtapes’ comprising tracks sampled and edited from his own recordings of sounds and conversations. He stores these on cassettes. Despite the car crash he witnessed he learned quickly and then became a highly-skilled driver. The film’s first bank job sees Baby successfully elude a great many police squad cars without difficulty and deliver the money and the three robbers to Doc. After the raid he has to go and collect coffee.

Despite his mesmeric skill, Baby is not always recognised as part of the gang by the others. Some of them taunt him and make fun of him. Doc changes the personnel for the team a couple of times but two remain, ‘Darling’ (Eiza González) and ‘Buddy’ (John Hamm). They have more to do with Baby and he is less able to remain a silent part of the gang. ‘Bats’ (Jamie Foxx) is an addition who is both bright and brutal as well as combustible and his nickname fits. I realised, looking back, that there is a spread in Sight and Sound (July 2017) with Wright interviewed by Mark Kermode and Christina Newland discussing the season of US car films that Wright curated at BFI Southbank. I discovered many references to other films I haven’t seen as well as quite a few I noted watching the film so I won’t repeat them all here. I’m not really interested in cars per se, so apart from enjoying the stunt work and the editing this wasn’t my source of viewing pleasure. Nor was the crime genre/heist movie narrative. It’s well done but nothing special apart from the visual style conjured up by Wright and cinematographer Bill Pope. I noted that in his interview Wright suggested that one of his problems with the studios was their insistence on promoting the genres they believed would sell his picture rather than attempt to market the film he had actually made. This was the case with Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, which flopped but is now considered a ‘cult film’. He admits that his own lack of understanding of Hollywood marketing was a problem. In the case of Baby Driver, however, the studio, Sony, at first seemed to think that as long as they had stars and car chases all would be well.

During the post production some studio executives wondered why Wright included the credit sequence in which Baby just collects coffee for the gang after the first bank raid. They couldn’t see the importance of the song ‘The Harlem Shuffle’ by Bob and Earl and the way Baby in effect ‘performs’ it on his walk to and from the coffee shop. It’s a great song, one of my favourites and there are actually two versions of it on the soundtrack. Wright says the early crowd reaction at the SXSW Festival to this sequence and the general use of music changed the studio’s ideas. Some wag suggested the film was “Gone in Sixty Seconds directed by Busby Berkeley”. Wright was very pleased with this. This not just an action crime film, it’s also a form of musical, except here all the music is diegetic and playing from Baby’s iPods – so, kind of diegetic with a twist, it is ‘in the world of the film’ but we are privileged to hear it because it should only be heard by Baby.

It’s the music, both the tracks and how Wright uses them that make the film for me. It’s a tour de force of editing. The other genre element I really enjoyed is the rather sweet romance between Baby and the girl in the diner, Debora (Lily James). There is one moment between them that sums up the difference between the US and UK and Wright wrote it beautifully. Debora is intrigued by names and how they appear in songs. ‘B.A.B.Y’ by Carla Thomas is one of the tracks that appear in the film. Debora is sorry that her name appears in only a very few songs and she and Baby quote the Beck song but she says that is not really my name and Baby tells her about ‘Debora’ by T. Rex, but he calls the band ‘trex’. Marc Bolan and T. Rex were more popular in the UK than the US I think and ‘Trex’ is a brand name for vegetable fat used in baking in the UK.

Whether you like the cars or the music doesn’t seem to matter. The film was a big success around the world and Baby Driver is now streaming on itvX in the UK. I’m looking forward to finally getting round to watching Last Night in Soho, released in 2021 when I was still wary of returning to cinemas. Here’s the Baby Driver trailer with a snippet of Dave Brubeck’s ‘Unsquare Dance’.