Last week we pitched a 300-word critical review, to be written over the weekend and then workshopped in class. This is mine.
No film exists in a vacuum. All but the most experimental filmmakers weave a fabric of archetypes, narrative patterns and cultural touchstones into something that is — hopefully — new. The internet has opened up entire worlds of art for young practitioners to draw from in their own work, from vintage rock albums and arcane literature to obscure films that previous generations of artists could have enjoyed only rarely at repertory cinemas. As a result, we live in a time where there is no single dominant vector of influence, and never before has mass culture been so vast and varied in its sources of inspiration.
Baby Driver director Edgar Wright has made a career of invoking pop cultural history in his work, from Spaced’s litany of direct visual references to cinema history, to Scott Pilgrim vs The World aping the aesthetic of video games, to the “Three Flavours” trilogy’s collage of zombie/cop/sci-fi tropes. It’s as if Wright is attempting to personify Quentin Tarantino’s famous quip that “when people ask me if I went to film school I tell them no, I went to films.”
With Baby Driver, Wright has distilled referentiality into an art form of its own, where any deeper symbolic meaning is cast aside in favour of allusions, references, cameos and easter eggs. For audiences, the experience is a two-hour long game of spot-the-reference as much as it is anything else, and in this way the film is tailor-made for a generation of viewers raised with the history of human culture mere clicks away.
Wright is careful to ensure that the film is a high-octane thrill ride no matter how familiar the viewer is with the history of cinema, but there is a strange pleasure to be found in recognising the main character, Baby (Ansel Elgort), as a sort of millennial echo of Ryan O’Neal’s character from The Driver (whose director, Walter Hill, has a voice cameo in Baby Driver), or noting that the construction of scenes in which Doc (Kevin Spacey) briefs his criminal underlings on the plans for their next job, are reminiscent of another heist-gone-wrong film: Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs.
By under-serving deeper meaning and symbolism, Baby Driver opens itself up to the accusations that it is all sound and fury signifying nothing. But when the sound and fury is this enjoyable, does it matter?