Jessica Tandy as Daisy Werthan in DRIVING MISS DAISY

JESSICA TANDY

JESSICA TANDY as Daisy in DRIVING MISS DAISY

Many older female stars wanted to play Daisy. But theater legend Jessica Tandy (she was Blanche to Brando's Stanley in A Streetcar Named Desire) got the part, and she leaves her lasting landmark performance on film. This is Tandy's finest two hours onscreen in a film career that goes back to 1932. Her graceful, unfussy style is a sharp reproach to the histrionics in Steel Magnolias, the other late 80's flower movie based on a southern play. The elegant simplicity of this Daisy leaves no doubt about which is the flower of choice. Fervent forlorn queens will out to snuff me for preferring ‘Daisy’ to ‘Magnolia’. But it’s a better film.

DRIVING MISS DAISY is a film of great love and patience, telling a story that takes 25 years to unfold, exploring its characters as few films take the time to do. By the end of the film, we have traveled a long way with the two most important people in it - Miss Daisy Werthan (Jessica Tandy), a proud old Southern lady, and Hoke Colburn (Morgan Freeman – equally brilliant), her chauffeur - and we have developed a real stake in their feelings.

The movie spans a quarter century in the lives of its two characters, from 1948, when Miss Daisy's son decides it is time she stop driving herself and employ a chauffeur, to 1973, when two old people acknowledge the bond that has grown up between them. It is an immensely subtle film, in which hardly any of the most important information is carried in the dialogue and in which body language, tone of voice or the look in an eye can be the most important thing in a scene. Tandy shows astonishing range as she ages from a sprightly and alert widow in her 60s to an infirm old woman drifting in and out of senility in her 90s.

Hers is one of the most complete portraits of the stages of old age I have ever seen in a film.

It’s another match made in Heaven. Her and Morgan Freeman. In her long career in film and always celebrated on the stage. Miss Tandy never had a role that had richness of humor and richness of toughness that Miss Daisy. Jessica Tandy bring to it a mastery of what might be called selective understatement. No apologies either. She is a spectacular accumulation of tiny obsessions and misconceptions. Miss Tandy creates a particular woman who is sometime hilariously wrong headed but always self-aware.

Her Miss Daisy possesses the kind of stubbornness that one hesitates to crack, since, underneath, there is something extremely fragile and scared. Yet there is also a fierce intelligence that comes through here – No more moving is in the film’s final moments – for both these stellar actors. It’s a moment and wipes away any missteps in the films big jumps earlier and bizarre casting of Dan Aykroyd. That final moment is a revelation- a deep exhilarating sigh of tenderness and love between two people – it’s brilliant acting.

Mr. Meisner used to talk about how her husband, terrific Actor Hume Cronyn (her co-star in COCOON ) used to go around New York pitching the multiple gifts of his wife Jessica to every producer, director, and writer in town. Breaking through finally to Elia Kazan and Tennessee Williams for ‘Steercar’ - “he was always her biggest fan”. I was knew Sandy when Jessica Tandy finally won her OSCAR and the next day in class Sandy said – “Well, he finally did it. Good ole Hume. She’d been an extra without him you know?”

Well done Hume.