Driveways

Synopsis

Late one summer night in a residential neighborhood in upstate New York, a car pulls up to a dark house. Kathy and her son Cody have come to the house with their sleeping bags. They find the house has no electricity and leave for a nearby motel. Del, an elderly widower next door, watches them from his upstairs window.

The next morning Kathy calls the electric utility to have power restored to her recently deceased older sister April's house; Kathy has come to pack it up and sell it. She learns that April owed the electric company $900. Upon returning to the house they realize that April was a hoarder.

Cody goes outside and tries to get some water to drink from a hose. Del sees him from his porch and tells him to turn the faucet the other way, and Cody does, wetting his shirt in the process. Kathy sees this and assumes that Cody bothered Del. She explains her presence and curtly tells Del she does not let her son talk to strangers. But later, when she learns Del's ride to a local veterans' event has not shown up, Kathy takes him to the local Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) lodge herself, while complaining about the electric bill.

When Kathy and Cody return to April's house the next day, they discover that Del has run an extension cord across the driveway from his house to theirs. Later, Kathy and Cody visit Charlene, a local realtor, to list the house. Kathy balks at taking Charlene on a walk-through, but after Charlene tells her that the house does not need to be presentable she relents. When Charlene sees the inside, she understands why Kathy had reservations.

That night at the motel Cody asks Kathy about April, whom she did not know well since April was 12 years older. The next day, Cody meets two other neighborhood children while cleaning some furniture in the driveway. Cody also sees two other boys, Brandon and Reese, imitating professional wrestlers. The boys' grandmother, Linda, comes to greet Kathy outside. Linda recalls that April was a nice woman who did not want anyone to come into the house.

Kathy and Cody check out of the motel and start sleeping in the house. Del helps Cody bury a dead cat, and takes him to bingo at the VFW.

Production

After the success of Spa Night, his feature debut, director Andrew Ahn was looking for his next project to be something more distant from his personal experience. "I felt really sick of myself", he told Filmmaker. "I didn't want to talk about being gay and Korean-American anymore."

According to Chau, who had already reached out to Ahn to express interest in working with him, she was even further intrigued when he told her how he had told the producers that for his second film he was interested in telling an intimate family story. She found it a departure from the ambitions of most directors of well-regarded debut features, who in her experience want to move on to big-budget franchise pictures. "I thought, 'I got to ride with this guy.'"

Paul Thureen says the inspiration for the story came from his co-writer Hannah Bos's background working in her mother's antique shop as a child. "She usually had to go into people's houses after they died", he recalled. "So she's interested in the stories objects tell about people." Kathy and Cody's relationship is modeled on Bos's relationship with her mother.

The hitchhiking trip Del recounts taking as a younger man after his military service in the film's closing monologue is similar to one Thureen's father took at a similar stage in his life. Thureen, like Cody, was shy and anxious to the point of vomiting before his own birthday parties or other stressful social events, as a child, leading him to value relationships with adults.

"What I love about Hannah and Paul's writing is that they understand characters so well and the dramatics of a scene," Ahn said, particularly singling their work out for the respect they showed their characters. "There's a real tension to their work but in a beautifully subtle way, and they are doing things that I wouldn't be able to do." Specifically, in Driveways he pointed to Del's final monologue as one of them.

Preproduction

Ahn had considered many scripts before Joe Pirro sent him Driveways. After reading it for the first time in a crowded coffeeshop, he realized he needed to read it again, alone, at home, to fully appreciate it; when he did it brought tears to his eyes. "I was blown away by how human it felt." Thematically, he said, "it explores what it means to connect with someone else ... that despite these barriers between us, we can find something really human and soulful."

Ironically, for Ahn, given his initial desire to do something as unlike his first film as possible, he suggested that Kathy and Cody be written as Asian rather than White in order to emphasize their otherness in April's community, which gave some of the existing dialogue, such as Kathy's first meeting with Linda, additional layers. The producers, Ahn recalled, were excited by the idea.

Other than that, the film does not reference their ethnicity, something Chau appreciated. "I certainly would not have signed up for the film if Kathy and Cody were just two-dimensional characters who existed solely to experience blatant racism or microaggressions, so that the audience could be delivered some clunky message about how racism is bad." Ahn also found some items that seemed like distinctly Asian items for April to have hoarded, but did not actually suggest any to the film's production designer.

The story was originally set in western Illinois, where writers Hannah Bos and Paul Thureen had grown up. Ahn found the move to the Hudson Valley of New York, to also be ironic since it led to principal photography taking place mostly in and around Poughkeepsie, where Bos and Thureen had met as students at Vassar College. The script did not require much revision to reflect that change.

Where Spa Night had been difficult to finance due to its subject matter, relying in part on money raised through Kickstarter, Ahn said, Driveways utilized traditional American independent film financing, which depended on the actors attached to the project. Dennehy had been one of the first actors to commit to the film, after he liked the script. Hong Chau, after seeing Spa Night at theaters, had emailed Ahn and told him she would be willing to do anything he wanted her to do in his next film; Ahn had coffee with her and came to believe that "she would bring that humanity to the character I was looking for." Maven Pictures soon took the film on.

Filming

Principal photography took place during July and August 2018. The production set up offices at Poughkeepsie's Mid-Hudson Civic Center (now the Majed J. Nesheiwat Convention Center) and built some sets for interior scenes there. Elsewhere in Dutchess County, locations used besides the neighborhood with the two houses included a Hyde Park ice cream stand and roller rink where Hannah Bos, one of the writers, had gone skating while a student at Vassar. Another scene was filmed at a hardware store in nearby Pleasant Valley.

The production found some other locations across the Hudson River in Ulster County. Del and Cody visit the Rosendale Library in one scene; Del and Rodger go shopping at a small grocery store in that town in another. Some urban street scenes were shot in Kingston and New Paltz. Pirro estimated that the production spent over a million dollars during 10 weeks of shooting.

Ahn had worked with a child actor before when making his debut short Andy, so "I wasn't intimidated by the challenge of doing a feature film with a child actor at the center." He had shown Jaye's parents, but not Jaye himself, the script; Jaye was only shown the scenes he would do 20 or 30 minutes before shooting them. "I just wanted him to stay present and in the moment," Ahn said, adding that Jaye did that very well in every scene. Overall, the director said, "I didn't want [his] performance to feel super-cute, like a Welch's grape juice ad. I wanted it to feel like life."

Jaye and Dennehy worked together for several days before Chau arrived to shoot her scenes. During that time, they developed a rapport that their characters echoed; Ahn recalls that he had to prod Dennehy at some points to be a little more gruff with Jaye. On the day they shot the scene in which Del tells Cody he will be moving to Seattle, after they had finished shooting both actors' closeups and, Ahn thought, the scene, Dennehy asked if they could shoot some more because Jaye's performance had given him some ideas. Ahn was impressed by the older actor's respect for his young costar. "[Dennehy] could have phoned in this performance and I would have been grateful", Ahn said. "But he really tried. He was working hard."

Chau, playing a mother in a film for the first time, developed a similar rapport with Jaye. Ahn recalls how, in the scene where the two eat pizza on the darkened porch of April's house, they kept interacting and eating between takes. "It felt really easy and natural. I was lucky."

Release

The film had its world premiere at the Berlin International Film Festival on February 10, 2019. It also screened at the Tribeca Film Festival on April 30, as one of five films selected for the festival's first Critics' Week. In December, FilmRise acquired distribution rights.

With most theaters closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, FilmRise released Driveways to video-on-demand services on May 7, 2020.

Reception

Critical response

On review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 99% based on 77 reviews, with an average rating of 7.9/10. The site's critic's consensus reads: "Understated yet powerful, Driveways is a character study anchored in fundamental decency—and a poignant farewell to Brian Dennehy." At Metacritic the film has a weighted average score of 83 out of 100, based on 19 critics, indicating "universal acclaim".

The Chicago Tribune's Michael Phillips called it "a small, very quiet, very powerful 83-minute short story of a movie." Dennehy had died a few weeks before, and Phillips took the opportunity to review the actor's stage and screen career, while calling his Driveways performance "marvelous ... I'm so glad Ahn and company managed to give [him] such a big-hearted goldmine to serve as the actor's valediction." Rolling Stone's David Fear concurred; after reviewing Dennehy's career he observed: "What we didn't know was that he had one last great turn in him before he'd be gone, one that would remind you of what an imposing presence and, paradoxically, a gentle giant he could be onscreen."

"See it now," said Fear, who had seen it during its festival runs the year before "and it feels like a salve." Isabel Jones at InStyle also said the pandemic had improved her estimation of the film. Other critics noted how thematically timely it was due to the separations arising from the pandemic and the social distancing measures mandated to control it. "[L]ike just about all pop culture right now, Driveways feels a bit like fantasy. Suddenly I am nostalgic for things I formerly kind of hated, like surprise visits from nosy neighbors or loud roller-skating rinks," wrote Alissa Wilkinson in Vox. She saw the film as anticipating the kind of relationships people might seek out as the pandemic eases, closer to their physical homes. "For me, a film like Driveways is like a firefly caught in a jar, a small light of something like hope that we can learn from one another and love one another, despite whatever storm is raging in the outside world."

Chau and Jaye also earned praise for their performances. "[T]he single mom [Chau] gives you here is a sustained portrait of wariness and weariness," wrote Fear. "[W]e can see her love for her son as well as her believable impatience with some of his quirks", agreed Wilkinson. Jaye, according to Fear, took "one of the least precocious turns from a child actor ever." Variety, reviewing the film at the time of its premiere in Berlin, echoed Ahn's hope for the boy's performance in saying Jaye was "always convincing, never cutesy".