Review of Driving Lessons (2006) by Greg K — 08 Oct 2011

A very slow film about not very much, the main character easily the most boring character in the film. He was seventeen, a mama's boy, running around helping his do-gooder mother to do good. It was hard to figure out who was who as well.

At the dinner scene, I thought the vicar was a visiting vicar, and the old man was the dad, until I was told by someone who had already seen the film that the vicar was the dad and the Mum was Laura Linney and the old man was a weird visitor whose backstory is never explained.

The young man gets a job with Julie Walters who was playing an unnecessarily foul-mouthed luvvy actress type. I detest films that try and "shock" viewers with use of f-bombs and blasphemy. It's not big, it's not clever and I'm not impressed.

There was one scene near the end where the drippy church girl who had rejected the heroes advances was making some kind of platitudinous declaration and he eventually told her to go forth and multiply and that was the only occasion where I thought strong language was warranted.

The luvvy actress tries to get the young man to go camping with her which is a bit weird and uncomfortable, it's like, is she trying to turn him into a lover, a gigolo? In the end it turns out they're just really good platonic friends, and he goes off and has an uncomfortable sex-scene with a clipped accented Scottish girl who is really scraping the bottom of the barrel.

I mean the boy comes across like an unwilling, shy teenage boy, okay so he's got a pulse and he's male but doesn't she have slightly higher standards than that? Anyway. The ending has a strange dramatic twist, and none of the fallout at the end could be foreseen at the start which I think is a failing of the narrative arc.

All these weird things happen and you think "Oh what, they were??? What???" and by that time you don't care anyway. Everyone in this film should be ashamed of themselves. And aren't there enough British actresses around to play English mothers, do we really need Laura Linney? No offence but I prefer her when she plays Americans as she is on.