Driving Miss Daisy

2 Pages 623 Words

DRIVING MISS DAISY

Driving Miss Daisy is a warm heart felt movie about independence, love, trust, honor and friendship. As the movie opens, Miss Daisy still lives in proud self-sufficiency, with only her cook to help out, and she drives herself around in a big, new 1948 Packard. One day she drives the Packard over the wall and into the neighbor's yard, and her son lays down the law: It is time that she have a chauffeur.

She refuses. She needs no such thing. It is a nuisance to have servants in the house, anyway - they're like children, always underfoot. But her son hires a chauffeur anyway, and in their first interview he tells Hoke that it is up to him to convince Miss Daisy to let herself be driven. Thus commences a war of wills that continues, in one way or another, for 25 years, as two stubborn and proud old people learn to exist with one another.

Hoke's method is the employment of infinite patience, and Miss Daisy tries every bit of them throughout the movie. Hoke is not obsequious. He is not ingratiating. He is very wise. His strategy is to express verbal agreement in such a way that actual agreement is withheld. If Miss Daisy does not want to be driven to the Piggy Wiggly market, very well, then, Hoke will not drive her. He will simply follow her in the car. The car by this time is a shiny new 1949 Hudson, and Hoke somehow defuses the situation by making the car itself the subject, rather than himself. It is a shame, he observes, that a fine new car like that is left sitting in the driveway, not being used. It's good for a car to be driven.

Eventually Miss Daisy agrees to be driven, and eventually, over the years, she and Hoke begin to learn about one another. Neither one is quick to reveal emotion. And although Miss Daisy prides herself on being a Southern Jewish liberal, she is not always very quick to see the connections between such things as an attack on her local synagogue and the Klan's attacks on black chu...