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Trailer for "Driving Lessons"

Jeremy Brock claims that Driving Lessons, his debut directorial effort, was inspired by his youthful experience in the employ of Dame Peggy Ashcroft, one of the great ladies of the British theatre. (Of her infrequent forays into the world of cinema, she is probably best remembered as the abused country wife who shelters Roger Hannay, the fugitive hero of Hitchcock’s The Thirty-Nine Steps, and, almost a half-century later, as Mrs. Moore in David Lean’s 1984 adaptation of E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India.)

This early encounter with theatrical eminence may have been vitally important to Brock, who went on to a fairly successful career in TV and screenwriting (Mrs. Brown and Charlotte Gray). Or not. It’s hard to tell from his movie, even though that’s what it’s supposed to be about. The way it’s put together, it’s hard to account for the life-altering change in its innocent-hearted, buttoned-up young hero.

Ben (Rupert Grint) is the 17-year-old son and only child of a stridently earnest and religious mother who hovers oppressively over his existence (Laura Linney). His father is a nice, reticent, browbeaten Anglican vicar. (Brock’s father was a vicar, too.)

Mater has Ben constantly engaged in charitable community work, and sticks him into her church pageant (playing a tree!). She’s also giving him nervous-making driving instruction because she won’t delegate the responsibility to a neutral pro. And she’s taken in a rather weird boarder, an older man who, it seems, is “recovering” from having run his wife over with a car (Jim Norton in a truly odd, non-speaking role).

So Ben’s a poster boy for repression and silent resentment. His breakout begins when he answers an ad for a personal assistant placed in a Christian magazine by Eve Walton (Julie Walters, who plays Grint’s mom in the Harry Potter movies), a retired actress whom Ben first encounters in her garden, where she’s hacking away at overgrown plants and bluing the air with her obscene curses.

“Evie” is a dotty, flagrantly self-dramatizing and self-centered combination of the grand-mannered and the gonzo. Soon enough, she has Ben driving off on an involuntary overnight camping trip—she makes the car’s ignition key temporarily unavailable by swallowing it—and fearing his mother’s wrathful response. He also imbibes some demon wine with her. (“Tell God I made you do it.”)

If all this isn’t bad enough, she takes him off almost immediately afterward on a road trip north to an Edinburgh literary festival where she’s to give a reading. And where Ben goes dancing at a club and then home with a girl. It’s also where it becomes obvious that his and Evie’s relationship is based on a mutuality of need.

None of this is subtle, and little of it is unpredictable, nor need it be. Allow me to come clean: I’m something of a sucker for this kind of thing. For example, I teared up at the end of last year’s Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont, a variation on this theme with Joan Plowright. I’m quite willing to be taken in by shamelessly emotional, intergenerational hokum.

But Brock doesn’t seem to have an aptitude for this, personal experience or not. What’s especially surprising is how badly written his movie is, given his credentials. The tone veers between the broadly, banally comic, clumsy attempts at sentiment-inducing material and, darker, spikier efforts that come across as cartoonish. You just can’t self-indulgently unwind with Driving Lessons.

The movie even fails to give Walters much opportunity to have fun with her bolder than life character. Her presence is really too secondary to Grint’s. She does lean into the role, but, what with the thin material and some uncertain direction, the result is too much a matter of physical ticks, running gags, and some noisy line readings. (And, to be fair, four or five good lines.)

Grint may have a future beyond the Potter franchise, but he didn’t get much opportunity to refine the comic timing he’s shown in that series.

To succeed with this kind of thing, you’ve got to give people more of a chance to feel pleasant guilt than Brock has with this movie.