by Sam Juliano
‘There was a real Miss Daisy. She was a friend of my grandmother’s in Atlanta, back in the forties when I was a child. She was a “maiden lady” as we called it then, the last of a big family, and she lived in what I remember as a spooky old Victorian house. There was a Hoke, too. he was the sometime bartender at our German-Jewish country club, and I believe, he supplemented his income by bartending at private parties around town. And Boolie…well, I really didn’t know him, but he was the brother of my dear Aunt Marjorie’s friend Rosalie, They were real people all right, but I have used only their names in creating the three characters in ‘Driving Miss Daisy….’ –Alfred Uhry, playright.
Driving Miss Daisy was the first play that Alfred Uhry composed, and he based it on people he had known growing up in the South, particularly his grandmother and her driver. The play’s original schedule called for it to run for five weeks at Playrights Horizon, a New York nonprofit theatre that seated an audience of seventy-four. When the run was up, the play was extended another five weeks, and when that was up, it moved to a bigger theatre. A year and a half later, the show was still playing in New York, and around the country, and it soon won the Pultizer Prize.
Warner Brothers hired gifted Australian director Bruce Beresford (Breaker Morant, Black Robe) to helm the film version, which would feature Uhry’s own adapted screenplay. While on stage the story was negotiated with minimal sets, (chairs representing car seats were basically the components) the film version allows for some lovely rural indulgence, in and around Atlanta, Georgia where the film takes place, beginning in 1948. “Miss Daisy” Werthan is a crotchety, parsimonious and exceedingly stubborn widow of seventy-two years, who, while insisting she can still drive, must nonetheless bow to the wishes of her son Boolie and insurance companies who are threatening to drop her after she backs the car into a sharp decline on the grounds near her home. The alternative forced upon her is a black chauffeur named Hoke, who is known to Boolie to be a reliable and honest man. Hoke states that he’s thrilled that the Werthans are Jewish, as from past experiences he’s found them much easier to work for than the predominant Baptists of the Deep South. But in Miss Daisy he meets someone unlike anyone he’s ever encountered. She’s ornery and taciturn, and wearing her down turns out to be a formidable task that requires more servitude than he would ordinarily impart. A proud and respectful man who is about sixty years old when the film begins, Hoke is an unemployed, uneducated African American, who previously worked as a deliveryman. His patience and loyalty eventually brings out the latent humanity in Miss Daisy, and over a period of twenty-five years in these two lives (with Boolie providing an occasional, often exasperated intrusion) the relationship morphs from discord to deep harmony and friendship. Cynical moviegoers may scoff at the final scene, when a touching realization is vocalized, but it’s the final coda in a film that is about the intimacy and true meaning of friendship. (more…)
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