Happy Academy Awards Day!
On this day when we celebrate great filmmaking and storytelling, and having written about most of the nominated scripts, I wanted to shine a light on a film that got overlooked, the Brian Dennehy vehicle DRIVEWAYS, which tells the story of a young mother, Kathy (Hong Chau), who arrives in town with her shy 8 year old son Cody (Lucas Jaye) to clean our her deceased sister's house, and the elderly next door neighbor Del (Dennehy) who befriends Cody.
Written by Hannah Bos and Paul Thurteen, the script is really bold for its defiance of the typical storytelling structures. There is no antagonist in the film, and also no real conflict between any of the characters. At the very start Dennehy’s Korean War veteran Del watches the Korean-American Kathy and Cody trying to make their way and it looks for a moment like this might be another GRAN TURINO. But that’s really just our natural impulse to look for conflict at work.
In terms of a problem that drives the action of the film, there’s really just the slow and mostly uneventful process of cleaning out Kathy’s sister’s house, and Del and Cody's developing friendship. The closest the film has a low point is Cody yelling “No” and running out of the house when he finds out Del’s daughter is moving him to Seattle.
And yet for all this the film breathes with a great and quiet life. Which is crazy. That should not work.
The longer the movie went on the more I found myself wondering, how can does this movie have me so completely hooked when it lacks so many of the things the standard stories rely on?
Here’s the thing that struck me: Every character has a hole, something missing in their lives. Kathy has not only lost her sister, she has no sense of who she was. When they arrive and she discovers her sister was a hoarder, it's devastating to her. It only accentuates that sense of absence.
Cody has no friends, and not a lot of skills in dealing with social interactions. And much like Kathy, as the movie first progresses that problem only becomes more acute. When he spends time with the neighbor’s grandchildren, two little monsters who like to wrestle and drink sugar, at the very moment it looks like things are going to take a more predictable turn – they force him to wrestle, nightmares ensue – instead he anxiety-vomits (it's a thing) and runs home.
Kathy and Cody also clearly struggle with making ends meet and having any kind of life. Meanwhile Del meanwhile struggles silently with the absence of his wife and also the fact that with her gone he suddenly realizes his entire life has now more or less passed.
In every story our characters have some kind of hole. And one way or another, that drives their action. But where the typical path is that they make choices to fill or face that hole, DRIVEWAYS instead allows each character to see and respond to the other’s emptiness. Kathy tries to help Cody. Del befriends Cody. Cody asks Del about Vera.
And it’s in taking what seem like these sideways steps of helping each other that they each get activated into new life. Cody has the confidence to reach out to the nice kids who like manga – and who at the start got him interested in reading it. Kathy asks Del to tell her about her sister, and ends up deciding to move into her house. And in the film’s gorgeous, unexpected ending, Del opens up and talks to Cody about his life, which has had a bit more pain and loss in it than we’ve known.
(When the film suddenly ends after he finishes, as Cody puts his arm around him, I have to say I got a little giddy. There’s nothing so exciting as seeing a story hit its landing in a way you could never have seen coming.)
One of the things that was drilled into us in film school was that you want conflict in every scene. Where there is no conflict, there’s probably not much going on. For me, DRIVEWAYS is a great reminder that while that may often be true, that doesn’t mean you need external sources of conflict, aka a villain or a “problem”. The holes in your character’s lives are conflict enough.
And the thing that happens when you trust that is not only that a different kind of structure and story has the chance to grow, but you may perhaps end up bringing to light the fragility we all experience in our lives, and give us some hope that it’s precisely these quiet, unseen struggles that make us each so incredibly beautiful.
STARTING TOMORROW: A WEEK OF SONDHEIM!
