Driving Miss Daisy (1989)

Rating: 85%
Well I needed to get back to reviewing the more recent best picture winners at some point, so let's start off with the last best picture winner from the 80's: Driving Miss Daisy.

Plot: Daisy Werthan is a 72-year old widow in Alabama, Georgia who lives alone in her house under the exception of her African-American housemaid Idella. One day Daisy has trouble with her car and ends up wrecking it on accident and so her son, Boolie wants her to have a chauffeur for her own good but she stubbornly refuses. But then Boolie finds an African American man named Hoke who was a chauffeur for a judge, and hires him to drive for his mother. Daisy refuses to have Hoke drive her, but after she fells embarrassed whenever Hoke drives her around in her car when she goes on errands on foot, she agrees to let him drive her. 

This is a nice and sweet film. It has a very nice story, it is warm and well paced, it does a very good job at getting better and deeper as it goes on, and it's just a good film altogether. Notice how I didn't mention the acting in that sentence. That's because that can't just be summed up in a short part in the middle of that sentence because the acting is generally the heart of this film. I mean the stars themselves shouldn't have to go without saying; Morgan Freeman, Jessica Tandy, Dan Aykroyd, I don't seem to have seem Tandy in a lot of other films, but Freeman and Aykroyd are well known to me. But even if Tandy isn't known to me, she's just as memorable in this film as Freeman and Aykroyd. All three of them - Tandy and Freeman especially played very charming characters. They were well acted, the chemistry was well shown, and it had some really well done makeup during the end of the movie. It doesn't surprise me a whole lot that this film won best makeup at the oscars too because they did it remarkably well and it really helped with telling the end of the story. Now this film does go into the racism from around that time, but I don't think they really shove it in your face. They picked the right moments to get into that and I think they did it in a way that worked. 

And that's my review for Driving Miss Daisy. It's a nice warm story that doesn't go too much into the racism at that time, (at least not for me) and otherwise is a nice time for watching some memorable performances from Tandy, Freeman and Akyroyd.