Susan Granger’s review of “Learning to Drive” (Broad Green Pictures)
If you enjoy richly observed, cross-cultural character studies, this dramedy should appeal to you.
When she’s is abruptly dumped by her longtime husband (Jake Weber) for a younger woman, starchy Manhattan literary critic Wendy Shields (Patricia Clarkson) is bereft. After 21 years of marriage, she is forced to sell their book-filled Upper West Side brownstone and begin life anew in a small apartment.
Wendy’s basically alone for the first time, since her grown daughter, Tasha (Grace Gummer), has taken up farming Vermont. When her well-meaning suburbanite sister, Debbie (Samantha Bee), sets her up on a blind date, it turns out he’s into tantric sex, making their intimate encounter totally exhausting.
Determined to become more self-sufficient but scared of getting behind the wheel of a car, Wendy hesitantly decides to take driving lessons from dignified Darwan Singh Tur (Ben Kingsley), who gently but firmly refuses to allow her to quit, even when she’s terrified crossing the Queensboro Bridge.
“You can’t always trust people to behave properly,” Darwan cautions.
“Ain’t that the truth,” Wendy murmurs.
A devout, highly principled, Indian-American Sikh, Darwan is going through his own midlife crisis: an immigrant wearing a turban in post-9/11 New York is often harassed by taunting racists, yelling, “Osama!”
In addition, Darwan’s sister has arranged a marriage, dispatching Jasleen (Sarita Choudhury), a bride from a neighboring village in India, whom he meets for the first time when she arrives at the airport, carefully carrying her traditional wedding dress.
Amusingly adapted by Sarah Kernochan (“Impromptu,” “9½ Weeks”) from an autobiographical New Yorker essay by Katha Pollin and amiably directed by Isabel Coixet, it’s basically a metaphor-filled, sympathetically nuanced two-hander for Patricia Clarkson and Ben Kingsley, who previously co-starred in Coixet’s “Elegy” (2008).
On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “Learning to Drive” is a delicate, sensitive 6 – teaching nuanced lessons about self-empowerment, reinvention and simply moving forward.
