3.5 stars (out of 5)
Director Isabel Coixet’s films have, of late, been a dark and sometimes dreary bunch (like the gloomy and inscrutable Another Me), so it’s a relief that her latest Learning To Drive is wryer, sweeter and far less pretentious.
Darwan (Ben Kingsley) is a Sikh living in New York who works as both a driving instructor and taxi driver, and when he one night picks up a married couple having a nasty row, he stays out of it but is compelled to return a parcel that the distraught Wendy (Patricia Clarkson) accidentally left in his cab. It transpires that she’s a famed book critic whose arsehole academic husband Ted (Jake Weber) is leaving her for a younger woman, and she also needs to learn to drive now that Ted’s not around as he was always the chauffeur. And isn’t chance a wonderful thing?
Darwan takes Wendy on a series of lessons around sunny (and fairly upmarket) Big Apple locations and teaches her about calm as, all the while, he tries to remain just that as his own life takes various turns: his nephew Preet (Avi Nash) is being pursued by the authorities; his sister insists, via Skype, that he marry; and we occasionally glimpse the ugly mistrust of some of the locals as they hoot at him in the street and call him ‘Osama’.
And yet putting the plot like that makes it sound far more melodramatic and tiresomely political than it actually is, with Coixet and screenwriter Sarah Kernochan concentrating mostly upon the unexpected but lovely friendship between Darwan and Wendy, as Kingsley and Clarkson deliver fine, subtle and very touching performances. It’s too modest a movie to truly scale the gooey emotional heights, and the (ahem) age of our stars might put off some audience members, and yet this is still worth seeking out before it’s squashed by yet another gas-guzzling blockbuster.
I Wake Up Screening 