Seven years ago, director Peter Farrelly used the Toronto International Film Festival as a springboard to glory: His road movie “Green Book” had a relatively low-profile premiere on the Tuesday of the festival’s second week, won the TIFF People’s Choice Award and went on to take down the favored “Roma” and win the Oscar for Best Picture. But that kind of Farrelly lightning isn’t likely to strike again this year with the road movie “Driver’s Ed,” directed by Farrelly’s brother and frequent co-director Bobby, which premiered on Friday, late in this year’s festival.
It’s not that “Driver’s Ed” has any ambitions to be another “Green Book.” In keeping with many of this year’s TIFF films, it’s an audience movie, not an awards movie. But it’s a pretty tepid audience movie, a coming-of-age high school comedy populated with characters who’ve been kicking around since before John Hughes: the kid who outsmarts the demanding but hapless principal, the super-smart but social awkward Asian student, the stoner who’s got more on the ball than you realize…
A veteran director isn’t necessarily disqualified from making an effective teen comedy, but “Driver’s Ed” is mildly amusing at best. It’s a good-natured and good-hearted film without much of the edge or hilarity the Farrelly brothers brought to “Dumb and Dumber” or “There’s Something About Mary” – serviceable, but there’s a reason it’s being dropped at the end of the festival, several days after much of the non-Toronto-based audience has gone home.
And it’s not exactly a great next step for Sam Nivola, who had a key role as the youngest son of Jason Isaacs and Parker Posey in “The White Lotus” but went from one of the year’s most provocative TV shows to a film whose provocations don’t go much beyond a few drug jokes, a raucous frat party and a fair amount of profanity in lines that include Molly Shannon’s school principal telling driver’s ed teacher Kumail Nanjiani that he’s good at talking to kids because “you like them a f–k of a lot more than I do.”
Shannon and Nanjiani are two of the most notable adults (and goofiest characters of any age) in the film, but the story focuses on the kids: Nivola as Jeremy, a talented but lovestruck high school senior who can’t seem to grasp that his girlfriend is not quite as committed to their relationship now that she’s off to college; Sophie Telegadis as Evie, a voice of reason and the love interest that Jeremy is too blind to see; Mohana Krishnan as Aparna, the would-be valedictorian who’s petrified that she’s risking her scholarship to M.I.T. by going off in a borrowed driver’s ed car with her classmates; and Aidan Laprete as Yoshi, the class drug dealer who used to be a brain before his mom died. “I’m still smart, by the way,” he tells Aparna at one point, “I just don’t give a f–k about anything.”
The four are thrown together in a driver’s ed class taught by Nanjiani, a lackadaisical kind of guy who also has both arms in casts and gives a series of different but equally implausible explanations for how he broke them. But Jeremy decides he has to save his relationship by borrowing the school’s car and heading to his girlfriend’s college, and the others go with him because … well, because there wouldn’t be a movie if they didn’t.
It’s a road movie full of, y’know, wacky escapades: accidentally dropping their cell phones in a river, tangling with a guy who robbed a hot dog stand, evading the school security guard who figures catching them will be his ticket back on the police force that kicked him out and eventually crashing a wild fraternity party when they get to the campus.
Meanwhile, Shannon and Nanjiani do their best to provide some energy, but they’re stuck in a classroom getting updates on the phone, which puts a damper on what they can actually do. Plus, Shannon wants to keep the whole thing quiet for fear that a stolen driver’s ed car will look bad on her permanent record. “I’m not letting three dips–ts and the valedictorian f–k me out of tenure,” she declares.
Is it a spoiler to say that that everybody learns and everybody grows? Probably not. It’s also not a surprise, and neither is anything else in this by-the-numbers teen comedy that finds some fresh new faces but doesn’t give them anything very new to do. Nivola creates a pleasantly clueless character while Telegadis makes the strongest impression among the teens, but it’d be nice if the vet in charge of it all had something that could challenge his cast more than this.
The fact that “Driver’s Ed” is an R-rated teen comedy may make it something of an anomaly these days, but it’s a fairly gentle and mostly goofy one that’s essentially spinning its wheels.
