There is a lack of gentleness in American movies. The slide towards amoral entertainment and artless technical execution is part and parcel of a highly commercialized industry. It's also part of what the public expects.

Escape is intended to be away from our here and now and into some other place often made unique by heightening our senses if not our sensitivity. Strangely enough this contradiction remains a core component of movies so it's a real surprise when films strike against convention and offer something different. In so doing they make us flex long-atrophied muscles and reconsider our expectations about filmed entertainment.

Sometimes this kind of cross programming is entirely noxious. Other times the effort is what we tend to label "original" and with this originality we escape the vulgarity and banality of our mass media, the movies as no exception.

Partly this vulgarity and banality stems from Hollywood's intentional appeal to youthful audiences. With a proportionally larger discretionary income, younger spectators support movies and crave action, sensuality and humor, the natural outcome of which is violence, sex and profanity. Few, then, are the contemporary films that risk their commercial prospects on wholesome entertainment without so many gadgets, squibs, cuss words and bared breasts to strengthen their appeal and guarantee a profitable result.

Driving Miss Daisy stepped into this gap in 1989 and offered a story of decency and friendship in a production by Lili Fini and Richard Zanuck. Based on Alfred Uhry's play of the same name that he also translated for director Bruce Beresford, it was planned as a unique vehicle for then-80-year old Jessica Tandy, the one-time grand dame of Broadway.

Relying on a very small cast Driving Miss Daisy tells the story of Daisy Werthan (Tandy), an aged Georgia Jewess, and Hoke Colburn (Morgan Freeman), a slightly younger black Georgian, who becomes her chauffer and close companion over a 20-year relationship. Without using bullets, car crashes, big production numbers or special effects, Beresford's drama is a remembrance of things more precious than spectacle. It offers the calmness of human drama played out in the changing times of Georgia from 1948-1968 and is carried largely on the shoulders of Tandy and Freeman who give two rich performances.

Attempting to fill the gap of Hollywood's vapid adventure stories Driving Miss Daisy imagines two people bonding despite their differences to discover real human commitment. Daisy is a widowed, cantankerous Jewish matron devoted to her faith, perhaps too dependent on her son and somehow courteously racist towards black folk even when given her bond to Idella (Esther Rolle), her black cook and maid. Hoke is an illiterate widower and former elevator man in need of a job who occasionally epitomizes the Uncle Tom figure while trying to co-exist with his white employer.

When Daisy's son Boolie (Dan Aykroyd) puts the two together after she totals her car an instant dislike develops, though not for the expected reasons. Daisy loathes giving up her mobility and independence while Hoke steadily rises above her racist assumptions to make her not quite color-blind but at least sensitive to the way she's biased against him. In this gradual rebalancing of employer with employee, Daisy and Hoke finally reach a common ground when she acknowledges him as her closest friend after 20 years of daily companionship.

There is lots of room to quibble about the film's racial dynamics, especially in the way Hoke never extends beyond his role as servant and foil for Daisy. Such criticism is perfectly valid but it's more a result of our moment than of remembering the 1940s, '50s and '60s when inter-race relations were markedly different than they are today.

In short, the overall representation of racial caste in the American South is one of Driving Miss Daisy's virtues. Everywhere dripping like morning dew, the division between black and white and, to a lesser extent, that of Jews and Christians is abundantly clear as Daisy and Hoke gradually learn to get along. Always she is in the seat of privilege, served by him and everywhere he is subordinate to her requirements save for certain private moments when he asserts himself carefully and politely.

Regional and historical influences act on them both to make them firmly of another time and place. Thus they become embodiments of an underlying theme about tolerance and acceptance that has entered the mainstream just like patriotism and gun-wielding heroes.

A good example is made when Hoke drives Daisy to visit her relatives in Mississippi. After making a wrong turn they retrace their steps and stop at a gas station where she uses the restroom. With tardiness weighing heavy she later refuses to let him stop to pee only to have him reduce her with cold logic about he's black and unable to use gas station restrooms so he's obliged to pull off the road when the need overcomes him.

Scaling out this kind of intimate, yet historically minded, exchange for 99-minutes of screen time rewarded Beresford's film and its overall gentleness with the status of blockbuster. Grossing $106 million domestically and $39 million internationally, Driving Miss Daisy was a hit that curried enough positive press and audience interest to mount an Academy Awards campaign.

Boasting strong production values with excellent period sets and costumes by Victor Kempster, Crispian Sallis and Elizabeth McBride, the film was also the toast of its craft. When adding to it the nearly infectious theme and score by Hans Zimmer along with Tandy's 50-year career, Driving Miss Daisy became a shibboleth of unusually virtuous proportions.

With the benefit of hindsight, though, it's also a film ready-made for rarely visited museums and dusty video store shelves. Like Gandhi and The Sting before it Driving Miss Daisy holds the power to touch and entertain its audiences but not so you would revisit it and take new lessons or glean new insight past what remains somehow obvious in its appeals to tolerance and acceptance.

Of course it's not always necessary for a movie to prove its value solely on its ability to encourage serial spectators who herald cultural products with the ferocity of zealots. However, the ability to apply works of art to new contexts over time and seek enrichment from them is one of the qualifications we should have for what we most celebrate in society. It should also be part of our expectation that Academy Award winning movies are the stuff of ages in clearly demonstrating what was most transcendent at a moment of time.

Knowing how Driving Miss Daisy wrested the Best Picture Oscar from its co-nominees, Born on the Fourth of July, Dead Poets Society, Field of Dreams and My Left Foot, it now seems like a minor miracle. I write this because I'm often moved by simple expressions of human kindness and understanding but I'm not convinced that a showcase of such sentiment is what constitutes great movie making. Nor am I convinced that Driving Miss Daisy was the true Best Picture of the year.

My position is added fuel when remembering that Spike Lee's highly political, and now quite specifically dated, Do the Right Thing failed to gain recognition beyond his writing nomination and the relatively narrow circuit of aficionados devoted to provocative and difficult films. Also aptly described as firebrand is Gus Van Sant's Drugstore Cowboy and Michael Moore's Roger and Me, both of which offered unusual glimpses of social disorder, the former with its focus on drug addicts and the latter with its documentary investigation of GM's corporate politics. But 1989 also saw the release of Kenneth Branagh's Henry V and Ed Zwick's Glory, both of which, for my dollar, are easily greater films to Beresford's Driving Miss Daisy.

I guess, then, my feelings about the Best Picture of 1989 are summarized by acknowledging odd swings towards decency that can influence Academy voters above considerations like posterity. While Driving Miss Daisy is a fine film, even a gentle and touching one, it is not the most meritorious movie of its time. In so being heralded it feels like an injustice to the cinema but also to decency since civil aspirations do not a brilliant film make.