Summary Points

• The term cinematic refers to the intrinsic qualities of the medium of film—its unique capacity to tell stories with moving pictures and sound and to manipulate space and time—and also to the various methods and techniques that filmmakers use “to add layers of meaning to the content.”
• A cinematographer describes making a movie as “the process of taking ideas, words, actions, emotional subtext, tone, and all other forms of nonverbal communication and rendering them in visual terms.”
• The production team coordinates efforts to visualize the world of the film—story, theme, characters, and setting. The aim is to create verisimilitude, a convincing appearance of reality, or believability.
• Content is the film’s subject; form is the means by which that subject is conveyed and experienced.
• The main formal categories are narrative, cinematography, production design, sound, acting, and editing.
• Formal analysis of film calls our attention to some method or technique related to the function of the film.
• Use of cinematic elements can be nuanced, open to suggesting various meanings in different contexts; the critical question has to do with both effectiveness and fittingness.

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Movie Clips

Hunger Games (2012) Tracker Jacker Exposition Scene

Manchester by the Sea: The Art of Flashbacks

Top Gun (1986) Call Sign Charlie

Up (2010) The “Married Life” Sequence

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2009)

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004)

Baby Driver (2017) Opening Clip

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Fun Stuff

Nico Lang, “35 ‘Clueless’ Quotes That Make Everyday Life Worth Living,” Thought Catalog, June 26, 2013

Take a closer look at Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s Dance at le Moulin de la Galette (1876)

Bethonie Butler, “How ‘This Is Us’ Helped Me Process My Dad’s Death,” Washington Post, March 26, 2019

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Sidebar: Enjoying the Ride--Baby Driver (2017)

“In Baby Driver, the director Edgar Wright is out to show you a most excellent time.” —Manohla Dargis, film critic, New York Times

While writing this book, I went to a special pre-release screening of Baby Driver hosted by my local film society. After hearing the discussion afterwards, I thought it would be fun to include the film as an illustration in this book. So, here’s what I watched on my summer vacation.

Reviewers much admired the latest offering from British writer-director Edgar Wright. “Fast cars, good tunes, helpings of danger and romance, all of it delivered with Wright’s customary visual panache—what more could one possibly ask of a summer movie?” Christopher Orr asks.¹ The film’s release, just before the July 4 weekend, signaled distributor Sony’s intention to compete head-to-head with the escapist fare that’s typical of the summer season. Also, Wright is best known for reworking American movie genres into comedic parodies like Shaun of the Dead (2004), Hot Fuzz (2007), and The World’s End (2013)—horror, action, and science fiction, respectively. Partly inspired by Walter Hill’s classic heist film, The Driver (1978), Wright said he conceived Baby Driver as an inventive “gangster movie in reverse: It’s not about a kid aspiring to a life of crime, but about a savvy lawbreaker who wants a simple, honest life.”² Accounting for all this, critics nonetheless brought different interpretive slants and standards to gauging the film.

Baby (Ansel Egort) survived a car accident that left him orphaned and with chronic tinnitus, which makes him as quirky as he is an exceptionally talented young getaway driver. The film’s action is synced up with the songs playing in earbuds Baby cannot go without. (The music relieves the ringing and buzzing in his ears and also metaphorically blocks out the wrongdoing he’s an accomplice to.) Baby unknowingly stole the car of Atlanta crime boss Doc (Kevin Spacey), who made him his indentured and go-to driver until he satisfied his debt. Beneath Baby’s cool exterior is a sense of guilt and kindheartedness on display without subtlety. And in tune with the caper-film formula, he has to pull off one more perilous robbery to redeem himself and ride off with his newfound love, waitress Debora (Lily James), whose dream is “to head west on the 20, in a car we can’t afford, with a plan we don’t have.” Plot turns regarding Baby’s “love interest and hope for redemption” complicate things, but otherwise, Orr remarks, “there’s not a great deal more to the movie than this—but why should there be?”³ It’s the stuff summer films are supposed to be made of.

Even so, some critics took exception, arguing that Baby Driver’s technical flair, exciting thrills, and kicking soundtrack add up to all genre and style, but no substance. “There’s so much to love in Baby Driver,” a Slate critic writes, “But its hard-boiled borrowings feel like a copy of a copy; blood is shed, but it only seems like ketchup.”⁴ Anthony Lane (The New Yorker) goes further, arguing that a “halfhearted backstory” makes Baby’s motives unclear; Baby is “barely a character at all. He’s an agglomeration of tics and style tips.”⁵ A writer for The Verge likewise thinks Wright’s “meticulous style does, at times, leave organic human emotion and connection behind.” In his view, Baby Driver “needs more than just inventive staging and style. It needs characters that are relatable and real, even if only in the context of their own cinematic world.”⁶

Still, others see it differently. David Sims (The Atlantic) thinks that although the caper film is “wrapped up in many of the visual hallmarks of the genre,” Baby Driver “unusually hinges on its protagonist’s moral growth—his evolution from willing stooge to reluctant hero.” In his view, this “surprising, but heartfelt, moral transformation” adds an innovative layer to the “getaway-driver movie.”⁷

For my part, I have to say I enjoyed the ride (no pun intended) as much as reviewers did for its cinematic mastery and countless allusions. And I realize that we expect people to be killed in crime stories; it’s a convention of genre. All the same, the way the movie lets highly stylized technique (very Quentin Tarantino-esque) outweigh character and ethical values left me a bit frustrated and uneasy. Talking with friends afterwards, I waffled between these concerns and simply taking the movie as an amped-up caper-heist film. It proved illustrative to see the way critics voiced these concerns in bringing different interpretive slants and standards to gauging the film.

Manohla Dargis’s sense that Baby Driver makes you want more resonated with me. “The edits snap, the colors pop and the cinematography serves the performances and the story,” she writes. In fact, the movie is so well-crafted, “so good that you want it to be better and go deeper, for it to put down its guns (or at least hold them differently) and transcend its clichés and cine-quotes so it can rocket out of the genre safe box into the cosmic beyond where craft and technique transform into art.”⁸ In other words, however innovative a genre film, Baby Driver loses some potential that could have come from deeper thematic and character development.

Then again, Los Angeles Times critic Justin Chang writes convincingly about the movie in terms of genre, Wright’s style, and the film’s own earnestness and aesthetic delights. “A reluctant crook, a waitress with a heart of gold, one last job—‘Baby Driver’ loves its clichés,” he observes, but finds that “even its corniest contrivances are rooted in authentic feeling, its throwaway moments grounded by the presence and physicality of the actors.” That Baby has a conscience gives the film “a moralistic undertow that its predecessors were too cool to bother with, and it also winds up draining some of the sleek, elegant fun out of the picture.” It makes it inevitable that the violence will turn “hair-raisingly nasty” in the film’s climax and that Baby will triumph and escape his life of crime. The nonstop soundtrack—which functions almost like a voiceover, turning Baby’s “actions into a signifier of mood, thought and character”—plays a central role in linking story, character, and theme. In the end, Chang concludes, Wright mixes and repurposes genres to tell “a story about identity and the expression of personal style, and how that expression to a large extent determines one’s place in the world.”⁹

Ann Hornaday brings aesthetic and cultural concerns together in a sharp critique of the film as an “often clever but ultimately appalling piece of genre inversion.” She makes the point that as a filmmaker Wright is not simply “infatuated with spectacular chases, shootouts and idiotically improbable gunplay, but he uses the sound of shots being fired as musical elements in themselves, the rat-a-tat-tats providing a homicidal, mostly bloodless rhythm section to the mayhem unfolding on screen.” In this way, the director “aestheticizes gun violence much in the same way it lifts up the once-kitschy, now-cool songs on its soundtrack: as playful, self-impressed pastiche.”¹⁰ From her vantage point, Baby Driver’s originality does not get beyond the superficial ethics underlying Hollywood’s all-too-typical glamorization of violence for the sake of cinematic spectacle.

In the end, that the bad guys are all killed is enough to liberate Baby from his traumatic past. The dreamy epilogue condenses the reluctant hero’s journey into a trite, happily-ever-after ending that makes romantic love salvific. The conclusion is supposed to reassure us of Baby’s basic goodness, or “inherent sweetness,” as Hornaday puts it, not mixing metaphors or mincing words. “But this movie leaves an aftertaste that’s slightly but unmistakably sour.”¹¹

The stock ending comes all too easy, simplifying good and evil and trivializing Baby’s—and our—experience instead of enlarging it. To be fair, that may well not have been the filmmaker’s intent. But we can still hope that a movie will offer more than entertainment for the price of a ticket, and we can ponder ways that it might. As it was, my experience with Baby Driver was enriched by familiarizing myself with the critical conversation about the film as art, culture, and entertainment.

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1. Christopher Orr, “Baby Driver Is a Fast, Fun Summer Ride,” Atlantic, June 28, 2017.

2. Stephanie Merry, “‘Baby Driver’s’ Edgar Wright Didn’t Make It as a Superhero-Movie Director. Maybe That’s Okay,” Washington Post, July 5, 2017.

3. Christopher Orr, “Baby Driver Is a Fast, Fun Summer Ride,” Atlantic, June 28, 2017.

4. Sam Adams, “Baby Driver,” Slate, June 28, 2017.

5. Anthony Lane, “‘Baby Driver’ and ‘My Journey through French Cinema,’” New Yorker, July 3, 2017.

6. Bryan Bishop, “Baby Driver Is the Ultimate Expression of Edgar Wright’s Madcap Creative Genius,” The Verge, March 13, 2017.

7. David Sims, “Baby Driver Is a Rare Heist Movie with a Heart,” Atlantic, July 4, 2017.

8. Manohla Dargis, “Review: In ‘Baby Driver,’ It’s Kiss Kiss, Zoom Zoom,” New York Times, June 27, 2017.

9. Justin Chang, “Edgar Wright’s Exuberant ‘Baby Driver’ Is an Automotive Musical Like No Other,” Los Angeles Times, June 27, 2017.

10. Ann Hornaday, “‘Baby Driver’ Has Musical Swagger to Spare, but Is Ultimately a Fetishistic Ode to Mayhem,” Washington Post, June 27, 2017.

11. Hornaday, “‘Baby Driver’ Has Musical Swagger.”

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