You Spin Me Round (Like a Record)

Rating: 8/10 (5 July 2020)

Old DC and Marvel superheroes, you may recall, used to have space age/cold war sci fi explanations for their powers. Superman fell from another planet and Earth atmosphere gave him superpowers, Spiderman was bitten by a radioactive spider, and so on. There was one exception: Batman. No radioactivity, no alien forces, no nothing. His excuse was childhood trauma. Baby Driver is not a superhero, except when behind the wheel, but in that respect he follows the Batman school.
Baby Driver is the 5th feature film directed by Edgar Wright, he of the famous, entertaining but otherwise unremarkable Blood and Ice Cream Trilogy (2004-2013), here revealing unsuspected talent.
Baby Driver tells the story of Baby (Ansel Elgort, showing promise as heartthrob) ace (understatement of the decade) driver who suffers from tinnitus since childhood, when a car accident killed his quarrelling-when-driving parents and left him as sole survivor. He exercises his near-superhuman driving skills whilst listening to an impressively comprehensive pop/hip-hop soundtrack, since he also developed lip-reading skills, so one could say he is at all times both aware and aloof. For vague but dramatically sufficient reasons, he is being blackmailed by bank-robbery mastermind Doc (Kevin Spacey, par for the course) into being the getaway driver in a series of jobs, which he performs half-reluctantly till he finds, guess what, True Love, in the person of diner waitress Debora (Lilly James, adequately endearing), compounding on his reluctance and ensuing that (spoiler alert) the expected obvious happy end doesn't quite materialize.
Baby Driver may not be the first attempt of film language at visual dub/R&B/rap/hip hop, but it is surely one of the more seamlessly accomplished, pace here or there superfluous twirling camera movements. More relevantly, both as drama and as thriller, its heart is in the right place, namely, all over the place. Baby´s tinnitus is an obvious metaphor for the way he interacts with the world, obvious but nonetheless unobtrusive as it devolves us the way we interact with the moving image.
David Bowie, I might have quoted in the past, famously wrote: "do you wonder sometimes about sound and vision?". Yes, sometimes.