‘Olivia Rodrigo: driving home 2 u (a SOUR film)’ Review: A Glorified Video Scrapbook That Captures Her Spiky Romantic Appeal
22.03.2022 - 23:49
/ variety.com
Owen Gleiberman Chief Film CriticFor 20 years, ever since Gilbert Gottfried made the tasteless crack that inspired it just a few weeks after 9/11, “Too soon” has been the mantra we use to jokingly suggest someone is making a joke before the time is ripe for it. But the phrase could also be applied to certain music documentaries.
“Billie Eilish: The World’s a Little Blurry” caught the first chapters of Billie Eilish’s career, starting in 2015, when she recorded and posted “Ocean Eyes” on SoundCloud — and though she is still a young star (just 20), the film felt momentous, because her stardom has had such an extraordinary trajectory, and you feel, in a way, that she remade the pop-music world in her own image.Olivia Rodrigo is a very gifted star, but it feels as if she’s living in that remade world — and “Olivia Rodrigo: driving home 2 you (a SOUR film),” which drops this week on Disney Plus, is a decently baked slice of fan service that still seems like it might be arriving a little too soon. The film, directed by Stacey Lee, is only 77 minutes long, and it doesn’t pretend to be a full-on documentary about Rodrigo’s life.
We never meet her parents, or her friends (other than her music collaborators), or get a glimpse of what her daily existence was like in Salt Lake City before Rodrigo mania erupted. Rodrigo first made a splash on the music scene in January 2021 (the film opens with her screaming, her hand clapped over her mouth in disbelief, as she hears her first single, “Driver’s License,” on a car radio for the first time — it’s already the biggest song on the planet).
That moment is “driving home 2 u’s” idea of pre-history. The conceit of the documentary is that Rodrigo is taking a nostalgic solo road trip, in her
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