REVIEWS
November 2019 | Sight&Sound | 65
Reviewed by Tim Hayes
Anyone who was situated geographically
closer to the real-life mountain of unsold
DeLorean cars that piled up in Northern Ireland
at taxpayers’ expense during 1982 than the
fantasy California where Marty McFly drove
one into the history books shortly afterwards in
Back to the Future could find that sympathy for
John DeLorean does not come automatically.
The charismatic and flinty American playboy-
industrialist depicted by Driven in the form of
Lee Pace would be unlikely to care. A burst of
attention currently being paid to DeLorean
by this film and by Framing John DeLorean – a
semi-dramatised documentary with Alec
Baldwin as the beleaguered executive – might
show that his rise and fall fits into a current
cultural wish, the one in which rich capitalists
with shady connections and stratospheric
self-belief are at some point dragged into
court rather than sailing serenely on. Except,
of course, that DeLorean consistently walked
out of court unimpeded, claiming to be more
sinned against by the various small men he
chose to include in his orbit than sinning.
Driven focuses on DeLorean’s period of infamy,
from the setting up of a car company bearing
his name to the subsequent desperate need
for money to keep it afloat, which put him in
the crosshairs of the FBI. However, the film’s
central protagonist is one of those small men,
Jim Hoffman (Jason Sudeikis), a low-level crook
living next door to DeLorean while working as an
FBI informant. Since Sudeikis is by nature a droll
straight man, his Hoffman constantly trips over
the gap between good intentions and inevitable
failure, while the film leaves open the question
of whether his relationship with DeLorean is
basically that of one hustler recognising another.
Director Nick Hamm and writer Colin
Bateman (both from Northern Ireland) can’t
stretch to any scenes of factories, industrial
production or the workers on whom DeLorean’s
world is built – or indeed any scenes of actual
California, with filming taking place in Puerto
Reviewed by Hannah McGill
The ‘farming’ of the title refers to the practice
that was unofficial but widespread in the 1960s
and 1970s, whereby the children of Nigerian
immigrants to the UK were fostered to white
English families while their parents were
studying or otherwise establishing themselves.
Though this was a continuation of fostering
practices commonplace in Nigeria, the
experiences of these children were complicated
by a fiercely racist popular culture and an
incendiary political discourse on immigration.
Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje’s debut feature
draws on his own life experience as one of these
‘farmed’ children: taken in by Essex scallywags
who were motivated as much by the additional
family allowance as by social conscience, horribly
bullied at school, improbably accepted by a
racist skinhead gang and pulled back from the
brink with the help of an inspiring teacher.
The startling one-line pitch – black man
becomes skinhead! – recalls The Believer (2001),
which followed a similarly self-abnegating
journey of an Orthodox Jewish youth, while the
sequences depicting the superficially attractive
camaraderie of the skins inevitably call to mind
Shane Meadows’s definitive take on that era, This
Is England (2006). Akinnuoye-Agbaje’s approach
is cruder and more flamboyant in terms of its
portrayal of both racism and violence, however,
depicting protagonist Enitan’s experiences
with a luridness that is at once shocking and
rather distancing. In the midst of increasingly
baroque and ritualised assaults – he is stripped
naked, threatened with having his penis
severed and almost forced to have sex with a
pig, which he ultimately kills instead – Enitan,
played by Damson Idris, remains a complete
enigma: because we only see him having things
done to him, we gain no idea of who he is.
Perhaps this is Akinnuoye-Agbaje’s way of
indicating that the relentless stresses of his
upbringing allowed no space for character to
develop; but in combination with the haphazard
depiction of the figures around Enitan, the effect
is a film in which no one seems to have consistent
or deep-rooted personality traits. Enitan’s foster
mother Ingrid, played by Kate Beckinsale, is
strong, loving and unambiguously racist; but
rather than these traits combining into one
confounding whole, we just see her behaving
entirely differently from one scene to the next.
Gugu Mbatha-Raw, meanwhile, as Enitan’s
teacher Ms Dapo, is landed with a character so
one-dimensionally saintly that her entrances
might as well be accompanied by the
sound of harps. And while John Dagleish
Rico, where a lush digital colour saturation gives
everything a sheen of unreality. But between
Hoffmann and Hetrick (Michael Cudlitz), the
crass drug dealer he is monitoring for the FBI,
the world of cash-rich Carter-era self-indulgence
we see on either side of the law deserves all
the Reagan recession heading its way.
That recession helped sink DeLorean, though
the film remains ambiguous about the exact mix
of personality flaws and criminal inclinations
that he may have brought to the table himself.
In other circumstances this could have been
a failing, but here it gives Pace a blank canvas
on which to deploy more screen presence than
everyone else combined, often just by directing a
deep gaze in the general direction of the camera.
Acting a decade older than his real age and
under DeLorean’s characteristic hair (though the
characteristic eyebrows came with the actor),
he makes DeLorean a watchful stoic poised to
duck any incoming blow. His voice rumbles
up through the local strata, equal parts menace
and seductive smoulder. Swathed in finest
polyester, this DeLorean seems as American
and unchained as his Pontiac GTO, famously
designed to seem as sleek as a fish, but at the
same time the kind of capitalist pantaloon whose
DMC DeLorean looks like a prop for a mid-1980s
science-fiction film and then doesn’t start.
Driven
United Kingdom/USA/Puerto Rico 2018
Director: Nick Hamm
Farming
United Kingdom/USA/France 2018
Director: Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje
Certificate 18 101m 31s
California, the late 1970s. Freelance pilot Jim Hoffman
is arrested by FBI agent Benedict Tisa while attempting
to smuggle cocaine into the US, and subsequently
becomes an informant, reporting on local drug
dealer Morgan Hetrick. Hoffman’s neighbour is John
DeLorean, a former General Motors executive who is
attempting to raise money for the manufacture of a
car he has designed himself. Hoffman and DeLorean
become friendly. DeLorean sets up a factory in
Northern Ireland to manufacture the car, but runs
short of money. Hoffman, apparently with the vague
idea of helping DeLorean, suggests to Tisa that the
FBI arrange a sting operation in which Hetrick’s
cocaine money is funnelled to the car maker. The
sting takes place, but DeLorean is arrested along with
Hetrick. In court, Hoffman resists pressure from Tisa
to implicate DeLorean as being the instigator of the
deal, and DeLorean is acquitted. Hoffman is taken
into witness protection, though an angry Tisa ensures
he will no longer be living in luxury. Further legal
proceedings against DeLorean for his business deals
and dubious associations prove equally unsuccessful.
Produced by
Piers Tempest
Luillo Ruiz
Brad Feinstein
Producer
René Besson
Written by
Colin Bateman
Co-scriptwriter
Alejandro Carpio
Director of
Photography
Karl Walter
Lindenlaub
Editor
Brett M. Reed
Production Designer
Fernando Carrión
Music
Gerónimo Mercado
Sound Mixer
Jay Meagher
Costume Designer
Julia Michelle
Santiago
©Driven Film
Productions Ltd. Corp.
Production
Companies
Romulus
Entertainment
presents a Tempo
Productions film with
The Pimienta Film
Co. in association
with Blue Rider
San Juan and
Embankment Films
Executive Producers
Walter Josten
Cyril Negret
Joseph Ingrassia
Imran Siddiq
Kweku Mandela
Jo Bamford
Luis Riefkohl
Colin Bateman
Alastair Burlingham
Charlie Dombek
Gary Raskin
Matthew Helderman
Tim Haslam
Hugo Grumbar
Diana Principe
Cast
Jason Sudeikis
Jim Hoffman
Lee Pace
John DeLorean
Judy Greer
Ellen Hoffman
Isabel Arraiza
Cristina DeLorean
Michael Cudlitz
Morgan Hetrick
Erin Moriarty
Katy
Jamey Sheridan
Bill
Iddo Goldberg
Roy
Tara Summers
Molly
Justin Bartha
Howard
Corey Stoll
Benedict Tisa
In Colour
[2.35:1]
Distributor
Vertigo Releasing
Highwayman: Lee Pace
Credits and Synopsis
This is Essex: Damson Idris, John Dagleish
A RT
PRODUCTION
CLIENT
SUBS
REPRO OP
VERSION
Reviews, 8
