It is a pleasant surprise to see Rupert Grint get to grips with some proper acting. Only the most ardent Harry Potter fan would claim that he was any great shakes in the Potter franchise, so watching his affecting performance here is a relief as much as anything else.
He is the put-upon teenager who manages to break free of his stifling mother (Laura Linney) when he goes to work for a has-been actress, played to hammy perfection by Julie Walters. Like Driving Miss Daisy and Transamerica, Driving Lessons is a film about two people with differing world views thrown together in the confines of a car.
The acting is deft and the dialogue is strong, but ultimately it doesn't do anything new with the genre. While Driving Miss Daisy tackled race and Transamerica dealt with gender identity, Driving Lessons is much less ambitious. It is, at most, the reconcilement of a conservative middle class religious boy with a flamboyant middle class atheist woman. The denouement is neither as dramatic nor as poignant as we have come to expect from this type of film, but that is as much to do with writer/director Jeremy Thorpe's choice of subject matter as his handling of it.
Moreover it is not, as other reviewers have suggested, a family film, unless your family has started using the c-word (one mention, as an adjective) and the f-word (all over the place).
It is a lovely film as far as it goes, but Thorpe, in his directorial debut, never quite shakes off his L-plates.
He is the put-upon teenager who manages to break free of his stifling mother (Laura Linney) when he goes to work for a has-been actress, played to hammy perfection by Julie Walters. Like Driving Miss Daisy and Transamerica, Driving Lessons is a film about two people with differing world views thrown together in the confines of a car.
The acting is deft and the dialogue is strong, but ultimately it doesn't do anything new with the genre. While Driving Miss Daisy tackled race and Transamerica dealt with gender identity, Driving Lessons is much less ambitious. It is, at most, the reconcilement of a conservative middle class religious boy with a flamboyant middle class atheist woman. The denouement is neither as dramatic nor as poignant as we have come to expect from this type of film, but that is as much to do with writer/director Jeremy Thorpe's choice of subject matter as his handling of it.
Moreover it is not, as other reviewers have suggested, a family film, unless your family has started using the c-word (one mention, as an adjective) and the f-word (all over the place).
It is a lovely film as far as it goes, but Thorpe, in his directorial debut, never quite shakes off his L-plates.