Driving Lessons

A pleasant little film that Harry Potter's chum Ron Weasley, a.k.a. Rupert Grint, made in the interval between the latest installments of that mega-franchise, writer-director Jeremy Brock's semiautobiographical Driving Lessons is a tale of a shy, retiring British teen named Ben Marshall (Grint) who's liberated from the stifling clutches of a demanding parent through an eventful road trip. The parent is his imperious mother (Laura Linney), and the person who takes Ben on his voyage of discovery is a wildly extravagant older woman with whom he takes a summer job—the elderly and endearingly eccentric retired actress Evie (Julie Walters), who both orders him about and urges him to find himself. Ultimately, Evie tricks Ben into driving her to Edinburgh for a poetry reading (though he doesn't even have a license), where he has his first sexual encounter. Later, his mother—furious that he went on the trip without her permission—orders him to have no further contact with the actress, setting up Driving Lessons' inevitable head-on crash between the two women. While there's not much new here, familiarity doesn't breed contempt, thanks to a winning cast, with Walters an adept scene-stealer and Grint proving that there's life beyond Hogwarts. Recommended. [Note: DVD extras include an 18-minute “making-of” featurette, seven minutes of outtakes, four deleted scenes (4 min.), and trailers. Bottom line: a decent extras package for a solid film.] (F. Swietek)