Learn­ing to Drive

There’s an argu­ment to be made that Patri­cia Clark­son should be in every movie that drops off the pro­duc­tion line. If not every movie, then at least more film­mak­ers should take advan­tage of her effort­less on-screen mag­net­ism and easy mater­nal charm. She is one of those actors who is best at play­ing Patri­cia Clark­son (or deriv­a­tives there­of), but we give Bill Mur­ray a pass for doing just that, so why not Patty?

Here she plays a soft­ly-spo­ken and some­what jit­tery lit­er­ary crit­ic who arrives at a cross­roads in her life when her hus­band decides to break off their mar­riage. Luck­i­ly for her, he announces his inten­tions while sat in the back of a cab being dri­ven by Ben Kingsley’s Dar­wan, a one-time asy­lum seek­er who works day and night to makes ends meet. In the day­light hours he plies his trade as a dri­ving instruc­tor, and Clarkson’s dis­traught Wendy is fond­ly coerced into becom­ing his stu­dent as a way of con­fronting her fear of the road.

The film is light­ness and fluff incar­nate, a breezy almost-romance with a squelchy side order of lib­er­al out­rage. While Wendy analy­ses the rea­sons for her split and tries to make embar­rass­ing amends with her soon-to-be ex-hus­band, Dar­wan is sub­ject to racial pro­fil­ing, street attacks and even an arranged mar­riage, all of which he bale­ful­ly takes on the chin, eter­nal­ly thank­ful for hav­ing been grant­ed Amer­i­can citizenship.

The pub­lic abuse is laid on strong, with direc­tor Isabel Coix­et and screen­writer Sarah Ker­nochan appar­ent­ly believ­ing that all those sit­ting out­side their small cen­tral cir­cle of char­ac­ters is a vio­lent, big­ot­ed para­noiac who thinks that immi­grants are out to slaugh­ter you and your fam­i­ly. Over­ly cute though they are, the film’s finest moments are the lessons, in which Darwan’s teach­ing method encom­pass­es drop­ping all man­ner of Zen-like wis­dom bombs. It helps that Clark­son and Kings­ley make for such a dar­ling cen­tral pairing.