Over in the Blink of an Eye

Driving Miss Daisy is a story told pretty straightforwardly—no flashbacks or flash-forwards, no narrative tricks.

It follows Daisy's life from 1948 until 1973. The movie's first thirty minutes or so span only a few months, but then the film starts to jump through time, showing us vignettes of only a few days in the lives of its characters every few years. It does this without the use of montage, a typical movie technique to show the passing of time.

Instead, we see time advancing by the use of makeup, adding wrinkles to Jessica Tandy, gray hair to Morgan Freeman, and making Dan Aykroyd look, well, the way Dan Aykroyd looks today. The time shifts, although chronological, can be confusing at first, but the film subtly cues you into the years using dialogue or news stories. It has a dramatic structure very similar to the play it was adapted from.