What musicals are is obvious—movies in which people sing and dance—but from the advent of talking pictures, there has been the special genre of the virtual musical, in which there’s so much music featured in the course of the action that, even without production numbers or musical performances, the movie feels as substantially determined by the music as any actual musical. Edgar Wright’s “Baby Driver” falls into that category—its protagonist, a twenty-ish man called Baby, almost constantly listens to music on one of his many iPods (he has a different one for each mood or occasion, he says); the music that he listens to, sampling fifty years’ worth of pop, is pasted from his ears onto the soundtrack; and he bounces, twitches, exults, and, above all, drives to that music. As in a musical, the songs of “Baby Driver” come first—it’s the digital version of a jukebox movie.
It’s also a mild, teen-friendly crime movie, about a young man whose peculiar past has locked him into a life of crime. Orphaned and injured as a child when his parents were fighting in the front seat of the car and crashed into a stopped truck, Baby grew up to have preternatural criminal skills and an obsession with cars. After stealing one that belonged to a crime boss called Doc (Kevin Spacey) that was loaded with loot, Doc compelled him to make restitution by serving as his on-call getaway driver. Now, nearing (he thinks) the end of his obligations, he’s got one more job to drive for, and he’s ready to make plans for his life. First, a job; his foster father, Joe (CJ Jones), an elderly deaf man who uses a wheelchair and with whom Baby speaks in sign language, suggests that he become a pizza-delivery driver (and this, Baby does). Also, the taciturn Baby meets Debora (Lily James), a waitress at a diner where his mother (a singer) also worked, and they quickly plan to leave town together. But just when Baby thought he was out, Doc pulls him back in, and when the final job doesn’t go as smoothly as the others did he comes into mortal conflict with several of his partners in crime, including Bats (Jamie Foxx) and Buddy (Jon Hamm).
It’s a tightly constructed story that starts with a single psychological factor—overcoming the loss of his parents and, as much, the legacy of marital conflict (in particular, his father’s loud aggression) that led to it. Baby wants to be a good man despite being a bad guy and discovers, American-style, that the only way to expiate his complicity in violence will be by way of violence. This story is admirably coherent, if simplistic; above all, it’s classical, built on a distillation of the Hollywood-studio-style heist film. It is, in other words, an imitation of generation’s worth of imitations (most conspicuously, those of Quentin Tarantino’s neo-heist-ism), each of which exists solely as a vehicle for the personal obsessions and originality of style with which a director infuses it. As such, it is a stringent test of a filmmaker’s art and temperament.
Unfortunately, Wright’s apparent commercial success in his enterprise (“Baby Driver” sold thirty million dollars’ worth of tickets in its opening weekend) contrasts with—and perhaps depends on—a conspicuous lack of artistic vision. “Baby Driver” plays like a Disneyfied version of an action film—rated R for, I suppose, its sanitized violence and middle-school cussing. Wright’s sense of style is movement in quantity rather than in detail. The camera whips and gyrates, generically sensationally, around and with Baby as he steps to the beat of his music. Elaborate car chases are edited to emphasize jolts and skids and crashes while almost never yielding a distinctive angle or provocative perspective. I was surprised to learn, after watching the movie, that its car chases were filmed as stunts, not assembled as C.G.I., because hardly a moment in the film actually feels viscerally frightening or thrilling. (The brief car chase in “Transformers: The Last Knight” offers more startling points of view and high-speed experiences than any in “Baby Driver.”) Editing to music as if he had just discovered vintage MTV, Wright cuts images together quickly, too quickly to let much be seen. The action is, in short, thin yet heavy, burdened with a pointless complexity that serves, above all, to mask—with music and quick cuts—the insignificance, impersonality, and indistinctness of each of its elements.
Wright’s sense of style mainly involves splashes of color that feel neither conspicuously artificial nor serendipitously found; its bright tastefulness has no emblematic power akin to James Dean’s red jacket in “Rebel Without a Cause” and no overwhelming dazzle as in Sofia Coppola’s “Marie Antoinette” or any frame ever filmed by Wes Anderson. The closest thing to a catchy concept is a scene set in a laundromat, where Baby keeps Debora company while she’s doing the wash; all of the dryers behind them are spinning with colorful clothing tumbling in them. But the dialogue in the scene is minor, forgettable, and insubstantial; it had me recalling the other great laundromat scene of yearningly romantic youth, the one from “Masculine Feminine,” filmed in 1965 (one of the subjects was Bob Dylan).
In Tarantino’s films, the characters have something to say about the pop culture that obsesses them; for that matter, in life, people have something to say about the pop culture that obsesses them. In “Baby Driver,” no one has anything to say about anything. The prevailing gentility of “Baby Driver” depends on its absence of substance. It has an admirably diverse cast, but its characters remain undefined, identity-free, generic. (It’s exactly the sort of ahistorical blanking-out of personal traits and cultural experience that Jordan Peele so successfully satirizes in “Get Out.”) The dialogue is almost entirely functional, advancing the plot without illuminating any ideas or subjects beside the characters’ missions and goals, and that dialogue is festooned with cheap verbal gaud that passes for wit and lands with sub-Catskills thuds, as when one member of the gang, called Darling (Eiza González), is challenged by another, Bats (Jamie Foxx), about her name—he asserts that it’s only her nickname, or “moniker,” and insists that she tell him her real name—which is Monica; or when one plotter, buying masks, mistakes Mike Myers of “Austin Powers” for Michael Myers of “Halloween.”
Wright displays a strange sort of sincerity in “Baby Driver,” but it’s the sincerity of social striving; the movie feels as if it were directed by Zac Efron’s fallback comedic persona—smart, chirpy, personable, bounding with positive energy, creamy with charm, desperate to be liked, and hiding any stray threads of desire, obsession, or weirdness. The weirdness factor of “Baby Driver” is close to zero. The one exception emerges when Baby, who surreptitiously records the sounds of his life (on a vintage mini-cassette recorder), brings them home and elaborately remixes them, snipping out a salient phrase and creating a sort of hip-hop mixtape using one phrase as an incantation—and does so with an eye-catching array of vintage audio equipment. This, too, unfortunately, Wright edits to shards, leaving merely a suggestion of his activity and reducing it to a pair of related plot points. Wright doesn’t display any more visual or process-centered curiosity about Baby’s music than he does about Baby’s driving; both are mere aspirational emblems of Baby’s—and the movie’s—cool factor.
“Baby Driver” seems, above all, like the film of a smart kid who has grown up and, having found popularity, has learned to dress his movies better and breeze through campus with a good word for everyone. (This desperate need to be liked, and its digital-media-centricity, made for the very subject of Wright’s daringly conceived and imaginatively realized 2010 film, “Scott Pilgrim vs. The World.”) Though filmed on location in Atlanta, the movie is textureless; the city seems plasticized and simulated by the carefully planned yet plain and uninflected images. The two moments when Wright’s cinematic juices seem to flow are two moments of violence. One—showing, in a wink, an impalement—is the closest thing to gore that that film offers; the other, an agonizingly slow, if obvious, resolution to a climactic conflict, is its closest thing to sadism, to delight in injury and death. These moments suggest that Wright might really get off on some heavy Tarantino-esque or Peckinpavian violence, if only he’d let himself go.
Wright doesn’t let himself go, but his movie has still satisfied critics who are in love with the idea of Hollywood providing something that’s not based on a superhero franchise, providing something that, with its retro soundtrack and retro cleanness, reminds them of a Hollywood that no longer exists—even if some of its luminaries certainly do. Great directors of the New Hollywood of the seventies—an age when the studios put big money into ambitious filmmakers’ wide-release movies—are still working, with independent financing, lower budgets, and more limited releases, but more daringly and originally than ever; along the way, they have outrun the critics who love their early stuff best. The nostalgia of “Baby Driver” is more than a celebration of the past; it’s a repudiation of much of the best and most original filmmaking of the present day.
