It’s impossible to summon any animus against Patricia Clarkson, no matter the quality of her material. Even while playing an angry, jilted, selfish New Yorker suddenly confronted by her lack of a chauffeur (i.e., her cheatin’ husband), she’s still Patricia Clarkson.
This is a very small film, greatly padded from an old New Yorker essay by Katha Pollitt, and it doesn’t leave much elbow room for Clarkson (as heroine Wendy) and Ben Kingsley (as her Sikh driving instructor Darwan) to navigate. Both stars generate enormous goodwill, even while you worry about Kingsley going back to the South Asian well — kindly accent, sage wisdom, infinite forbearance, but no loincloth or Partition.
You can be pretty sure that screenwriter Sarah Kernochan’s instructions were: “Driving Miss Daisy,” with Gandhi instead of Morgan Freeman. (Spanish director Isabel Coixet, of “My Life Without Me,” doesn’t add any twists.)
What’s been layered onto Pollitt’s 2002 account — pre-Uber and Lyft, we must point out — is backstory for Darwan, a former political prisoner about to undertake an arranged marriage with a fellow Sikh (Sarita Choudhury, from Mississippi Masala) he’s never met. Thus, in predictable script-o-matic fashion, one relationship forms while the other unravels. (Wendy spends way too much time confronting and obsessing over the ex, played with suitably frail narcissism by Jake Weber.)
True, Clarkson is an awful lot of fun when mad and spitting expletives left and right. And we’d rather see more of her midlife dating misadventures; this is a movie that would be measurably improved by some cheap Tindr and eHarmony jokes.
Its heart, though, is the Brief Encounter tension between the pious, honorable instructor and his slightly naughty student. Wendy’s got a mouth on her, nothing like the demure picture brides Darwan’s sister keeps recommending from India. But this is not the movie to push him — or formula — out of the comfort zone.
So in its comfortably therapeutic, How Wendy Got Her Groove Back kind of way, the picture works — no better or worse than a Lifetime original. Sporting a long black wig (and/or turban), Kingsley seems more aloof from the story, ever so slightly bored with Darwan’s virtue. (Every lesson is a lesson, chock-full of parables.) By contrast, Clarkson dives right in with her usual gusto. She acts the way she curses: direct, passionate, and signaling quiet self-delight at being able to fly off the handle. What next — flying lessons? Sign her up.
“Learning to Drive”
Rating: R, for language and sexual content)
Showing: Seven Gables
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