Learning to Drive

It's probably not fair to characterize the fitfully pleasant Learning to Drive as yet another Sir Ben Kingsley-in-a-turban movie (how many have there been?), but there is a sense of worn-out familiarity that attaches to this well-intended but ultimately featherweight indie drama about a privileged Manhattan lady and her relationship with her exotic, and presumably wise, driving instructor.

Wendy Shields (Patricia Clarkson) is the sort of character who exists only in the movies -- a literary critic with a high enough profile to be interviewed on NPR, a bustling well-lit office she rarely visits, an Upper West Side townhouse and a crumbling marriage. Her professor husband (Jake Weber) has strayed before -- at seven-year intervals; they've just had their 21st anniversary -- but this time it's not one of his students he's fallen for but, gulp, one of Wendy's favorite authors. So it appears a midlife realignment is imminent.

Wendy can't afford to buy her ex out, so goodbye, townhouse. Worse, it doesn't seem that Wendy is particularly good at being alone. And she can't even drive to Vermont to visit her back-to-nature daughter (Grace Gummer), as she's one of those tender urban flowers who never learned how.

Enter Darwan Singh Tur (Kingsley), a driving instructor whose second job as a taxi driver allows him both to witness the pathetic breakup of Wendy's marriage and to present himself as an honest man. Naturally, Darwan is not simply a working-class tradesman; he's a devout Sikh who sought political asylum in the U.S. after being imprisoned for years. He's educated and courtly, but we learn that he cannot get a better job because he insists on wearing his beard and turban. (A dubious assertion, but let's let it go; if Darwan was a college professor it would be harder to get him in a car with Wendy.)

Darwan is possessed of a preternatural equanimity. He is a kind of magical subcontinental who seems to specialize in soothing neurotic white folk. His most mundane instructions -- "Read the signs" -- come pre-loaded with significance. Even when he's set upon by idiots who call him "Osama" or by police who literally ask for his papers, he is calm and centered, with a Gandhi-esque dignity.

Except he's got problems of his own -- among them an arranged marriage with a woman he doesn't see as his intellectual equal.

While Kingsley behaves himself, and it's always good to see Clarkson in a leading role, there's not too much to recommend Learning to Drive. It's one of those movies where you feel every beat coming, that you can watch without any fear of being surprised. It lands somewhat closer to the reassuring sweetness of Driving Miss Daisy than the biting, ferocious humor of Mike Leigh's Happy-Go-Lucky. (Where is Eddie Marsan when we need him?)

Some people -- probably most people -- like that stuff, and when it comes with walls of books and the aspirational trappings of the New York intelligentsia, it goes down as easy as a middlebrow-quality product -- the sort of movie Wendy Shields might offer an opinion on if asked by David Bianculli.

MovieStyle on 09/18/2015