Driving Miss Daisy

Driving Miss Daisy (1989) records a very narrow slice of Southern life between the late 1940s and early 1970s. The setting is Atlanta. The principal characters are an aging black man in need of employment and an old Jewish woman no longer able to drive, or at least whose son does not want her to drive. She is feisty, stubborn, and independent, and when her son brings to her house the man he has hired to chauffeur her around, she makes clear her lack of interest. Gradually, over the course of twenty-five years, a friendship develops between the two. Although Daisy thinks of herself as a progressive woman who has never been prejudiced, she clearly is. She never recognizes the links between herself and Hoke. When the Atlanta Jewish Temple is bombed, Hoke remarks to her that the same men who committed that crime are also the men who commit acts of hatred against blacks. She fails to see the connection. Later she fails to understand why Hoke might want to attend a dinner where Martin Luther King is speaking—she had an extra ticket she could have given him—he drives her to the dinner but does not attend, waiting for her outside in the car while King gives his talk. Despite all of this, their friendship develops in spite of limitations of prejudice and racial divisions.

As the chauffeur Hoke Coburn, Morgan Freeman plays a role that earned him both praise and criticism. He is ingratiating, and there are stereotypical elements in his performance. But he brings Hoke to life not as a general type but as an individual human being. He plays a kind of black man who today would seem a throwback, an anachronism, by 2007 standards. Such men did once exist. To play such a character must have taken courage on Freeman's part, and might well have involved humiliation as well. Jessica Tandy is equally good as Daisy. Criticisms leveled against the film found fault with its portrayal of a friendship between the elderly white woman and her black employee. Such friendships did not exist, so the criticism argues, and the film perpetuates a damaging falsehood as a result. Such friendships may have been rare, but undoubtedly they did occur. Clearly there were black people who worked for white families who felt a sense of kinship with their employers, who may have identified with them to varying extents. Clearly also there were many black people who worked for white families who felt no such kinship at all. Does the film argue that we ought to return to former times, when divisions between the races were more clearly marked, when whites occupied rigidly defined social position over that of blacks? No, I don't think so.

In a sense, the film is about change, progress—both in a good and bad sense.

One can see how the film might be seen to suggest that social progress and modernization have come at a cost. In particular, Daisy's son Boolie and his wife Florine adapt a lifestyle that is decidedly untraditional, at least in the sense of Jewish traditions. They celebrate Christmas and put up seasonal decorations. Boolie may in fact affect Christian customs for the sake of his business, which relies on many non-Jewish customers. He also declines to attend the Martin Luther King tribute dinner because he fears that doing so may cost him the business of white patrons who dislike King. Boolie makes many decisions on the basis of what is good for his business. One might argue that this film portrays a kind of friendship that would have become much more unlikely in post-civil rights days. Thus from this point of view the film may bemoan the loss of such friendships. But what the film doesn't do is argue for a return to the past. It illustrates and marks time's movement forward and the changes it brings. The film effectively illustrates how people grow old, lose their friends, lose their bearings, become more and more alien and alone in a world that is moving forwards and changing without them.

An interesting aspect of this film based on the play of the same name by Alfred Uhry (who also wrote the screenplay) is its low-key portrayal of Jewish Southern life in Atlanta during the mid-twentieth century. In many ways Daisy and Boolie's lives are indistinguishable from the lives of many non-Jewish people around them. Daisy attends synagogue regularly and has her circle of Jewish friends—they play canasta together on a regular basis. They may be outsiders in a predominantly Christian city., but they are also citizens of that city (as Daisy makes clear when she attends the MLK dinner). Some minor conflicts in the film arise from the collision of Jewish and non-Jewish traditions. But Daisy's religion is an incidental context. It's important but not the center of the film. Her identity as a white Southern woman struggling against advancing age and her own prejudices is more important in the film than her religion.

Again we confront in this film the issue of representation. The film portrays an individualized situation—an individual white woman developing a friendship with an individual black man. The film makes no claims that these two are representative of a larger class of people, or that their friendship in some way is representative of a larger phenomenon between white employers and their black employees prior to the Civil Rights movement. But film is a representative medium—it portrays individuals who are also, inescapably, seen as representative types. Audiences are naturally prone to see individual characters in a film as representative of a larger, wider reality. When we watch films (or read books) we often identify with the individual characters—we see them as representative of a larger aspect of experience than their individual situations can imply. It is easy to understand why some viewers of this film may object to the portrayal of a friendship that they do not believe accurately represents white and black relations in mid-20^th century Atlanta. But this whole issue is fraught with complications. Often when we talk about the past, attempt to understand it, to portray it, we skew and distort our visions to encompass a past we want to believe in. How can we know what the facts of the past are to begin with, unless we actually lived through it? Even then our own prejudices and perceptions and memories distort our sense of our own experience.