Driveways

 

There can be a very fine line between a movie that is delicate and understated and a movie that is lazy and undernourished. Director Andrew Ahn is slowly perfecting the former. In the gentle, understated Driveways, he follows a single mom (Hong Chau) and her young son who temporarily move in next door to a quiet, lonely Korean War vet and widower (played by the late Brian Dennehy in one of the finest performances of his long, storied career). Ahn lets ideas and emotions linger but never underlines them and never tries to lead the viewer along. Instead, he lets his actors — and hence their characters — just be. Watching Brian Dennehy eat is like staring at a great, big novel; you can tell there’s a whole universe in there, but you also know that it would take some effort to understand it. The title may well be a metaphor for the elusive human connections we make before we go into our own little worlds, the interiors of which others rarely see.