Learning to drive

Navigating a traffic-cone chicane of driving metaphors and the issue of Ben Kingsley dressed as a Sikh, romantic comedy Learning To Drive nevertheless moves charmingly and gently through the gears.

I know Sir Ben was Ghandi and then Itzhak Stern in Schindler’s List and Don Logan in Sexy Beast, so we can usually believe him as just about anyone, but I did initially find it a stretch to buy him as a Sikh, with thick long hair under a pink turban and even thicker Indian accent.

It might not quite be ‘blacking up’, but there’s a hint of what felt like the bad old days here, even if Kingsley is nothing if not earnest and utterly committed to his role of an exiled Indian taxi driver by night and driving instructor by day, struggling to make a living in New York, along with plenty of other Sikhs, some of whom are illegal and live in overcrowded basement rooms.

As if to make amends for its casting, the film takes great care to portray the Sikh community sensitively, in an almost saintly light, particularly Kingsley’s own character, Darwan Singh Tur, whose approach to driving lessons is gnomic and spiritual in a bumpersticker sort of a way: ‘Read the signs’ and ‘Love is the one road to God’. Given how he takes his Sikh act to the full, he’s occasionally a bit like one of those old nodding dogs in the rear window (can you still get those?).

My other issue with the film is that Darwan the Sikh is mostly used as a plot device to alleviate the troubles of a rich white woman, played beautifully by Patricia Clarkson. Because that’s what immigrants are for, right? To unblock the neuroses of white liberals.

Thankfully, both actors are so wonderful that they just about get away with it here, even uttering all the script’s mystical driving metaphors about stop signs, green lights, moving forward and taking the wheel. Clarkson plays Wendy, a respected book critic whose husband has just left her – we assume for one of his students – and whose student daughter is spending the college semester on a farm in rural Vermont.

As a taxi driver, Darwan patiently witnesses Wendy and her husband’s teary break-up as they argue on his back seat. The next day, he turns up, with his driving-instructor turban on, at her door to return a package the distraught Wendy had left in his cab.

On a whim and with the intention of getting up to Vermont to see her daughter, Wendy hires Darwan to teach her to drive, something she’s never done as a lifelong New Yorker and having previously relied on her husband. Of course Darwan’s mystical Sikh methods end up teaching Wendy much more about life and taking new roads: ‘You only need a little courage, and a little gas,’ he says, with another head nod.

Directed by Spanish film-maker Isobel Coixet, the film has many fine moments. Clarkson is great to watch: shouting at her lawyer as she crumbles quietly inside, or being fixed up on a date with a pretentious banker who practises tantric sex: ‘I can ejaculate on Thursday, if you like?’ It’s all too rare to see Clarkson in a lead role and she seizes it with relish, making Wendy an intriguing mix of flaws, vulnerability and steel.

The film itself shifts gear (ahem) when Darwan’s arranged wife suddenly enters the picture (Sarita Choudhury), an interesting deviation in the plot I wasn’t quite expecting, ushering in some new, perhaps less welcome aspects to Darwan’s character.

I was slightly reminded of Spotlight director Tom McCarthy’s 2007 film The Visitor, which is more honest about immigration and liberal New York academics, though admittedly not half as romantic as Learning To Drive. In the end, for all its faults, Learning To Drive wins you over through the twinkles in the lead actors’ eyes, the sparkle of New York, the heartfelt culture clash and the way it subtly takes us into two very different life stories.