GLASGOW FILM FESTIVAL 2020 - Driveways
GLASGOW FILM FESTIVAL 2020
At its core, Andrew Ahn’s Driveways is a story about loneliness in a world crowded with people. In fact, it may be up for a discussion whether it is a story at all because it doesn’t sport a traditional narrative structure. Instead, it is crafted as though the camera just happened to be present and filming people getting on with their everyday lives, accomplishing mundane tasks, dealing with little crises and celebrating small moments of happiness.
This is not to say that the film isn’t interesting. On the contrary, it is an utterly fascinating slice-of-life drama. It is succinctly summarized as a marriage of narrative elements lifted from Clint Eastwood’s Gran Torino with thematic focus found in films of Richard Linklater, and a subdued sensitivity reminiscent of the works of John Cassavetes, Kelly Reichardt and So Yong Kim. As a result, Driveways manages to successfully grapple with a complex subject matter while retaining a fundamentally lean structure and a perfectly accessible format.
Accordingly, this entire movie can be easily condensed to a handful of sentences. It’s a story about a young boy, Cody (Lucas Jaye), who travels with his mother, Kathy (Hong Chau, known to wide audiences from Alexander Payne’s Downsizing), to clear out his late aunt’s house. There, he befriends his aunt’s neighbour, Del (Brian Dennehy), a Korean War veteran. As it quickly turns out, despite being separated by age, background, race and life experiences, Cody, Kathy and Del’s lives revolve around dealing with different flavours of the same emotion – loneliness. Interestingly, though, nothing substantial ever happens to them, because the story isn’t built to satisfy the definition of a typical drama. There’s no stakes, no inciting incidents, no escalation and no climactic resolution. And yet, the film is magnetically compelling, as though to remind the viewer that life doesn’t necessarily need to be operatic in order to be worthwhile.
Driveways uses extremely basic narrative tools to scratch at the human condition and instigate a discussion about the fundamental meaning of our existence without ever crossing over to the realm of Malickian pretentiousness. By identifying an overlap between a child misfit, an overworked single mother and a withdrawn widower, the filmmakers isolate a handful of key observations about the nature of happiness and suggest that the antidote to isolation is human interaction with kindred spirits. In order to thrive in the contemporary world built around appearances and pursuit of wealth, one should first and foremost build a microscopic community of friends and family — one’s own place on Earth. They go on to hint that happiness requires reckoning with one’s past mistakes, which is metaphorically presented in the form of Kathy sorting out her sister’s house and tackled directly within the budding relationship between Cody and Del. However, the filmmakers do not dish out any easy answers because there aren’t any. All they offer is an opportunity for reflection.
This is how this film should be understood — it's not a story per se, but a narrative mirror reflecting the effects of people losing connections with each other and withdrawing into their own personal spaces. Moreover, the film incidentally makes a handful of wider comments on the American society, such as ‘polite racism’ continually colouring human interactions, the many struggles of war veterans or the intricacies of growing up. These subjects never hog the limelight; they are just there as organic elements of the background and can only be amplified by a viewer willing and able to adjust their perspective and examine the film from a different complementary angle.
Driveways is a curious little gem that harbours a treasure trove of thematic and emotional complexity underneath its seemingly straightforward demeanour. It thrives on the back of Andrew Ahn’s subtlety behind the camera and the natural effortlessness of the cast in front of it, which enable and bolster the film’s key ideas and give it a lingering bittersweet aftertaste.
