Edgar Wright

People who have an obsessive passion for and enjoyment of Terry Gilliam films – or at least his more intense and bizarre creations like Time Bandits and Brazil – scare me. Guillermo del Toro, for example, was overjoyed to see his young daughter giggle with delight at the end of Time Bandits when (spoiler alert) the young protagonist’s parents explode. He’s happy that she found it funny that the boy’s parents died. It’s disgusting, but it’s all part of Gilliam – he has a sense of humor that goes for extreme intensity even if it crosses ethical lines, and some film enthusiasts really go for that. These films are, by and large, not too violent, but it’s often the merciless infliction of wild images and editing onto the audience mixed with the heartless infliction of “comedy without relief” onto the poor characters that makes these films so difficult for some to watch. Interestingly, upon watching Brazil again many years later for an audio commentary track, Gilliam found he wasn’t sure he liked the film very much because of how brutal its comedy and story were, but it is precisely the fact that the film is too much to handle in one sitting that draws some filmmakers to it.

Edgar Wright is one of the filmmakers who absolutely adores Brazil, and I think it really shows in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World: the most relentless movie ever made. It never stops. It just keeps blasting the viewer with more unconventional and experimental insanity that is incredibly difficult to wrap one’s mind around, all while retaining a formulaic story that’s perfectly easy to follow. The only way I was able to survive the movie was by taking breaks – I had to get up and walk to another room, or talk about what I’d just experienced with the friend of mine who so kindly subjected me to this film. I think I also could have used a snack break, and maybe a few naps. Technically, the film shouldn’t even be that hard to swallow: it’s not gory, it’s not scary, it’s not intensely dramatic (this film is, first and foremost, a comedy), it’s not addressing sensitive topics, it’s not making me feel “naked” the way The Graduate does, and it’s not flashing wild lights and vivid colors at me like that one irritating Canadian film. It’s simply difficult to process.

What makes it difficult is the unhinged creativity. There are no clear rules in this movie. When a man shows up with sexy demon hipsters singing a musical number as he flies around, you have to accept it, even though there is no setup for it. Honestly, the movie is so strange that, when one character’s ability to read minds is explained by the fact that he’s a vegan, I thought, “Oh, well that makes sense.” Relatively, that does make sense. It’s the best explanation you’ll get for anything in the movie. The Hollywood-trained mind isn’t ready for this.

What the film shares with Terry Gilliam is an unsettling contentment with the awkwardly terrifying conditions of its reality. There’s something very disturbing about seeing nobody react appropriately to the death of a boy’s parents – even if they are really bad parents – and watching old men in an office giddily force their bosses to walk off a blank from a skyscraper to fall to their whimsical deaths. When something that should alarm people is met with the wrong response, it creates an effect that just feels wrong on a moral level, and that’s all over this film. Right from the first fight scene, the way that other characters react to the brutality of what they’re witnessing feels off – it feels inhuman – and this makes the film tough to take on its first viewing (although I think it improves over time). However, what makes it possible for the viewer to adjust as the film progresses is the fact that the movie is largely operating on video game logic, where the impossible is often normalized in ways that would be unsettling if we thought about it, and Edgar Wright has forced us to think about it. He’s shown us a lot of our blind-spots in regards to video games simply by adapting the aspects of video games that no one has ever thought to adapt before.

I think that’s what I respect about the film. It tells its story in the way that it believes is the most fun, the most exciting, and the most respectful to the source, regardless of whether or not it’s what people are used to. There’s a sense that no one on set ever said, “Hey, this is going a bit too far, let’s dial it down.” Instead, they just followed every urge to do something fresh and exciting, and this philosophy actually paid off with a lot of really funny scenes. In fact, by putting the viewer in such a scared and vulnerable state, a lot of the comedy is made funnier, and the story’s messages are made more powerful. So, sure, I may have lost a significant percentage of my sanity from watching this film, but it was absolutely worth it to receive all of the joy the story brings and all of the power a filmmakers can have when he dares to be relentless.

(Still, that demon musical number is just plain stupid. Obviously.)

This is the best film of 2017 I’ve seen so far. Hands down. Let’s talk about why.

I love it when I see a trailer for an upcoming movie and think, “Oh my gosh – what is this and how was it able to get made in today’s world?” What puzzled me about the Baby Driver trailer, or at least the particular trailer I saw first, was that it looked like a generic action movie (by generic I mean it contains many of the most common standards of the genre, like impossible car chases and crime bosses who threaten to kill loved ones and 93 guns going off in every scene), but it actually looked good. As the trailer explained more about the premise of the movie and what conflicts arise in it, I couldn’t help but think that this film must have come from a brilliant auteur – a Chazelle or Scorsese. Then, with one name, it all made sense to me: Edgar Wright.

Knowing that Wright is a really smart director, and that I share a lot of his tastes, I went into the theater expecting the film to be pretty good … for a “gun flick.” I couldn’t have known I would later leave the theater wanting it to win Best Picture. So, herein lies the first reason why Baby Driver is the best film of the year: it made a great movie out of a not-so-great genre. Where other films in the genre would rely on CGI for their tricks, Wright amazingly depended on practical effects, giving every scene in a car all the more weight. I think Wright approached this movie like he was making a movie – not like he was making an “action flick,” but like he was just making a good, compelling film – complete with interesting characters, gripping drama, highly inventive visual storytelling, and awesome music. He took the film seriously as a work of art, and he made sure his story was as compelling as could be, borrowing from as many genres, styles, and influences as needed to accomplish this feat.

Now, I’ve recently written a lot about the Guardians of the Galaxy series, particularly in regards to its use of music. There’s a trend that I think started around the late ‘80s – it had certainly become the norm by the early 2000s – of film soundtracks relying on a lot of known pop music (particularly older pop music) to add some fun, familiar elements to the film. This is so normal for comedies, dramas, and comedy-dramas now that we usually don’t even notice it. This music is generally non-diegetic, but often crosses into diegetic, and is selected very late in the filmmaking process to help establish the mood of a scene. Marvin Gaye’s “You’re a Wonderful One” clearly has nothing to do with the story to the movie Bowfinger, at least not in its lyrical content, but it appears frequently in the film purely because its fun, bouncy sound reminds the viewer that the movie is fun. With Guardians, the music is never an afterthought and is virtually always diegetic (or at least semi-diegetic), often taking the foreground in the scene and having an influence on the plot. I believe this is a game-changer because it’s one of the only film series today to challenge the theory that film is a visual medium, suggesting that sometimes the music is what drives a movie.

Guardians, you’ve just made a friend.

And this is the second reason why Baby Driver is the best film of the year: it uses music brilliantly. First of all, its soundtrack is very good. Secondly, and more importantly, the music is often used to create different kinds of scenes that I don’t think I’ve seen before – scenes in which the visuals are so in-sync with the music that lyrics from the song decorate the sets, or scenes with the music turned up and the dialogue turned down such that we’re only left with the general idea of the events taking place, and that’s all we need. The scene with “Never Never Gonna Give Ya Up” creates a mood that is both weirdly funny and intensely dramatic at once, almost like The Graduate (but for very different reasons). Heck, Wright even works a song from a live album into the opening scene, which is almost never done in film if the live recording isn’t remarkably well-known, and he keeps the part with the singer speaking to the audience in, all in a way that feels perfectly natural. Thirdly, and this is perhaps the most impressive part of the movie, Wright uses music to make us feel close to a character with very little dialogue for a lead – we understand what he’s thinking and feeling through his music, and that’s enough to make us empathize with him completely.

The third reason why this film is the greatest of 2017 so far is that it racks up “points for style” like no film I’ve seen from the past 5 years apart from La La Land and the works of Wes Anderson. I’ve already noted some of this, like the integration of music into the visuals, but some of it’s in the little things, like the way the clothes in the laundromat are all primary colors to create a sense of childlike joy and freedom in a scene with Baby and Debora having fun. The beauty of the film is in the dramatic red light on the villain’s face in the climax, and the careful use of black and white in a few select scenes, and the way everyone in America is presumed to wear brightly-colored shirts on a sunny day (to contrast the attire in Wright’s films set in Britain). Wright brings back his old trick of tying what’s playing on the television set into the plot, this time very comically, and he even showed his well-known love for my dearest Phantom of the Paradise by giving Paul Williams a great little part. It takes a special kind of filmmaker to think to do these things, and I’m so glad we’ve been blessed with just the filmmaker we need in Edgar Wright.

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World Review

Baby Driver Review