Driving Lessons

Driving Lessons was written by director Jeremy Brock as a vehicle for Grint and Walters, who appeared together in the Harry Potter movies. They make a terrific screen couple. Walters is alternately zany and poignant, with Grint the perfect foil, a bemused, confused innocent who only wants to do good.

While Driving Lessons' writer-director, Jeremy Brock, sticks to the all-too-familiar template of such tales, he's given Walters her best role since "Educating Rita." Hamming it up with the precision of a master, she makes this somewhat plodding film a pleasure, as does young Grint.

For all its treacly excesses of the post- "Full Monty" era, British comedy hasn't entirely lost its teeth yet.

Linney hits a single note for her uptight character, while Walters travels the scale indiscriminately. Her outsized eccentric darts from amusing to grating. Only Grint is just right, as the boy they, and the film, can't do without.

Driving Lessons follows the well-worn path laid down by other, better movies while making strained, ludicrous things happen toward the end.

This coming-of-age movie, is a clumsy contraption, but it's nice to see Rupert Grint coming out from under that colorful thatch, and coming, not a moment too soon, into an appealing pre-maturity.

Because screenwriter-director Brock fails to create a moving relationship between its mentor and student in life's lessons, the film hardly resonates five minutes after it's over.