Baby driver 1.10

Title: Baby Driver

Text Type – Film

Director – Edgar Wright

Baby Driver is a movie about a young criminal who goes by the name of Baby. Baby is a good willed person who drives getaway vehicles during crimes and heists in order to pay of his debt. Once his debt is payed he starts seeing a girl called Deborah and starts living a normal life. This is short lived because as soon as he ends his life as a criminal the leader of the criminal organisation who goes by the name of Doc calls him in for another heist due to his incredible driving skills but Baby refuses until Docs threatens him with the life of this girl Deborah. When ever Baby is driving he listens to music on full blast and drives to the rhythm of the song. In almost every scene of the movie Baby will be wearing ear buds or listening to a radio because of his hearing problem which he got in a car accident, he claims that listening to music helps with the noise in his ears. During his heist he is partnered with three other criminals; Bats, Buddy and Darling. These people are real criminals who have an intention to harm for their own benefit. During the final heist in the movie we see the crew putting pressure on Baby because he has such a good will that it could be detrimental to the plan. As the heist plays out we see the crew perish one after another until it’s just baby left. Baby tries to escape by moving across the country until the police catch up with him and arrest him. His sentence get reduced due to his good character.

One message that was apparent to me while watching Baby Driver was how money influences so many of the choices we make but it’s not the key to happiness. In the film we see these despicable criminals risk the lives and work of innocent civilians just so they can make a profit. But Baby is the one exception, in the movie he doesn’t want the money and he especially doesn’t want to hurt anyone. We can see this through his actions. An example of when this happens is during one of the get away scenes we see Baby hijacking a car, which is justified as he is trying to escape. He removes the women from the car and before he drives away he throws her handbag to her. This strongly shows Baby’s good intentions as he’s trying his best to do the right thing for the good of others. The scene that I think shows this concept the best is when Baby is escaping, instead of trying to flee the city he drops back into his apartment to rescue his deaf foster father, he tries to give his foster father, ‘Joseph’ all of the money that he has collected through his crimes but Joseph responds in sign language by saying “I don’t want your dirty money.” This shows that Joseph understands that money isn’t the key to happiness. So Baby drives him down to a nursing home and leaves and audio messages for the staff to ensure that Joseph gets what he needs. This scene shows how empathetic Baby is to his family and that he never joined the crime syndicate for money but to protect the ones he loves. He picks up his Deborah and they drive off without caring about money or anything, they find happiness in each other.

After watching Baby Driver, I felt like Baby was a very strong relatable character due to his empathetic, selfless personality. Just like me Baby is young, impressionable but strong. I like to think that if I was in a lot of the situations that Baby was in I would do the same things he did. Also Baby is very aware that money is not the key to happiness as opposed to his partners in crime who base their lives trying to make money. I can relate to this idea because I live in Wanaka which is a town with a fairly high average household income and I see people around me constantly trying to have a new piece of technology or clothing because they think that will make them happy or popular. For my school it seemed like everyone had a smart phone except me but this never bothered me as I knew that my real friends wouldn’t care about what piece of technology I had. Only recently this year I actually bought my own smart phone just to move with how mainstream culture is heading.

Overall I think that Baby driver did an exception job at portraying a situation where a person with a good heart and good talent, what they would do in a dangerous crime syndicate. One of the strongest aspects of this movie was the sound track and they fitted songs perfectly into every scene. It could show the intensity of the scene or set the mood well. It also helped me connect with Baby as it could portray his emotions a lot of the time. Although I don’t think that the overall theme of the movie was to show how money can’t buy happiness I think it was very prominent and added a whole new dimension to the movie.

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