The Baltimore Sun from Baltimore, Maryland • 108

Fine acting distinguishes the sublime 'Driving Miss paisy 'Driving F'lss Daisy1 Starring Jessica Tandy and Morgan Freeman. Directed by Bruce Beresford. Released by Warner Brothers. Rated PG. Jessica Tandy, who plays Daisy, has never been so beguiling her grand old woman is a whole piece, not a cartoon; she shows us Daisy's intractability, her earnest liberal heart, her fierce sense of pride and loyalty, and her growing interpenetratlon with the man of another race who becomes her most intimate ally in an increasingly complicated world.

Yet the relationship, happily, is never sentimentalized: both Daisy and Hoke know and accept Its limits and the "love" they come to feel for each other is all the more passionate for its inability to be formally expressed. And as for Hoke, Morgan Freeman is simply magnificent. Do I smell an Oscar In the breeze? Eat your heart out, Tom By Stephen Hunter Sun Film Critic t's hard not to be half-crazy I for the love of Miss Daisy, "Driving Miss Daisy," Bruce I Beresford's gentle, loving I adaptation of Alfred Uhry's LI stage sensation (he wrote this screenplay, also) is as decent and wise a film as has come along in quite some time. Covering roughly 30 years in the lives of its protagonists, an elderly Jewish widow living in Atlanta and the black man who drives for her. It's fundamentally a love story, but a love story in an extremely circumscribed compass.

As performance, "Driving Miss Daisy" is nearly sublime. ing to the South; we're aware that things are changing, but we're also aware of how much they're staying the same. The liberal Miss Daisy can go listen to Martin Luther King, but she's still capable trf talking to her friends about blacks in the presence of blacks as If they didn't exist. The surprise of the film is Dan Aykroyd, as Boolie, Daisy's son. In so much of his other film work, Aykroyd has simply inflated his sketch-performer's penchant for cartoon-scaled characters.

Here, for the first time, he's an actual actor, giving Boolie a sustained, complicated, decent personality part compromise, part good-heartedness and part commitment to love and family. superior to Hoke the pre-modern black man, who inherited a different universe and had a different and far, far narrower range of possibilities and expressions. His Hoke talks in slow, almost childish rhythms, a voice apt to crack into falsetto, almost singsong diction and a body-language vocabulary both ingratiating and proud at once. Yet no one should confuse Hoke's easy ways with stupidity; he's as sly as they come, with a gift for mechanical things and an appetite for hard work, order and decency. In his quiet way, he's a hero.

Uhry passes on the temptation to cheapen the drama by yoking it too directly to the larger panorama of social change com Cruise. What's so good about Freeman's performance is how he exiles vanity and irony from It. Having clearly thought long and hard about the ways black men in the South had until the late 1960s to go along to get along, he's constructed a performance that hasn't a tinge of racial anger or condescension to it; you sense that Freeman the modern black actor doesn't feel for anyone who likes cop buddy movies. It's big! -Kulhy HufDiines. DETROIT PREE PRESS GOLDEN GLOBE NOMINATIONS BEST PICTURE BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR BEST ORIGINAL SCORE BEST DIRECTOR BEST SCREENPLAY "ONE OF THE GREAT FILMS OF THE DECADE, -Michael Medved, SNEAK PREVIEWS Yzi mil JS .) mwmmmmmmeimrmr jwwmyiimMww unn mm.

sty 'l "AN ELECTRIFYING DRAMA OF THE CIVIL Gene Shalit, TODAY SHOW "THE BEST PICTURE OF THE YEAR!" Dennis Cunningham, CBS-TV "EXCITING. POWERFUL. Joel Siegel, GOOD MORNING AMERICA "A MOVING FILM, BEAUTIFULLY Vincent Canby, NEW YORK TIMES SYLVESTER STALLONE KURT RUSSELL Tango Cash CaryElwes i MorgMreein IbnHETBUKUX MNERBROS. GONfRiNY auncrm ml a ANDREI RONQULOIrSKY SMRSTALLONE KURT RUSSELL TOO 4 CASH" BALANCE RDLDFLTEHIEIR SSltTERXWMttD URMINOO MFELDEN TiJON PETERS. PETER GlIR mm h-Siu Pkhtres rbbb Jodie Fields Aard Mm Holme BUTBICTtP g8 to jEiJ Fields Edm Zro AMAIKM Mm nun tuumt IJ f) UNITED ARTISTS UNITED ARTISTS I CTf A MOVIES AT GOLDEN RING MOVIES AT HARBOR PARK GENERAL CINEMA LOEWS LOEWS I SECURITY SQUARE 8 nrjr GLEN BURNIE TOWNCENTER 7BSTCRE0 V0RKRIDGE 4 NOW PLAYING AT THESE THEATRES ai-r USTEIfO uu-i-r tOfWSCOlUMBUPAUCU 10EWS5STMCIWMAS 10WS GUN BURMU it Am (mk3 mm ih mmt ii i nm, ttmt niHiun mum in wtrrfo fmsTS movies sno IHAM0RPR ATHU(USMTI0m LOEWS T0WS0H IW WfSIVIEW KMna u)xa tmiuna mam B)Ka HHn'i jm Maryland Live.

The Sun. January 12, 1990.