Learning to Drive

Patricia Clarkson and Ben Kingsley are such likeable performers that they're watchable in the worst tripe, but it's hard to imagine a weaker vehicle for their considerable talents than Isabel Coixet's Learning to Drive. In perhaps the lowest-stakes plot setup of all time, Clarkson plays Wendy, a wildly successful but newly divorced woman who needs to pass her driving test in order to visit her daughter at a farm. That's it, that's the movie. Kingsley plays her mild-mannered driving instructor, Darwan, an Indian immigrant and aging bachelor cannon-shot into an arranged marriage while nursing an admiration for Wendy that can never be consummated. Brief Encounter it is not; in fact, there's barely any film here at all, and the overarching message of Learning to Drive seems to be that nice people are nice, but that mean people are not nice, and that nice niceness is the nicest nice of all.