Green Book Better Than I Expected

Green Book (2018)

Director Peter Farrelly

Universal Pictures, 130 minutes, PG-13 (F-bombs, N-word)

★★★★

Green Book took home 4 Academy Awards, including Best Supporting Actor (Mahershala Ali) and Best Picture. Was it the best film or 2018? Good heavens no! It wouldn’t have made my top ten. Blackklansman was far superior. But Green Book was far better than I expected.

Green Book is based upon a true story. In 1962 jazz great Don Shirley (1927-2013) embarked upon a tour that took him to the Midwest and into the Deep South. The second part of this was both intentional and problematic. Shirley wanted to visit the South in reaction to an infamous 1956 incident in which crooner Nat King Cole was brutally beaten by white racists in Birmingham, Alabama. 

I will remind younger readers that in 1962, the Civil Rights Act that desegregated all public facilities lay 2 years into the future.The film’s title alludes to a travel guide published for African Americans that listed hotels and eateries that served people of color. (These were decidedly not the posh establishments to which Shirley was accustomed.) For the tour, Shirley hired a white Italian-American driver, Frank “Tony the Lip” Vallelonga (1930-2013), a bouncer at the Copacabana nightclub in New York. Vallelonga needed the work while the club was being renovated, plus he could provide “muscle” if needed.

Green Book is a classic road film that pairs two opposites. Dr. Shirley* lives above Carnegie Hall, is cultured, multilingual, erudite, a musical genius, sheltered, and stuffy; Tony the Lip (Viggo Mortensen) is barely literate, knows little about the world outside of New York City, smokes like a chimney, eats like a wallowing hog, is street smart, and presents as a low-level wise guy. I often use the phrase, “You can write the rest of the story.” That's certainly true in this case because you’ve seen dozens of tales in which two people who seem to have nothing in common learn from each other, bridge their differences, and become friends. Just fill in a few details here and there: family dynamics, character revelations, ugly incidents, rescues, and (of course) reconciliation.

Need I tell you that there is an entire genre of Hollywood films that couple a black character and a white one? Green Book flirts with cliché in its mix of humorous and poignant cultural disconnections. Director Peter Farrelly plays close to the formula, a strategy that led a few critics to call his film Driving Mr. Daisy (though technically it should have been Mr. Daisy Drives). There is plenty within this movie to ruffle contemporary feathers, including the charge that this is another White Savior feel-good film whose target audience is white liberals.

That is precisely the critique of Shirley’s surviving family members, several of whom dispute the film’s central friendship and claim that Vallelonga was an employee and nothing more. I am tempted to call sour grapes on that one; Vallelonga’s son was one of the scriptwriters and in a position to have observed that friendship firsthand. A more substantive gripe is that Shirley often appears as a chameleon that smiled through discrimination and was largely ignorant of how bad things were in the South. In life, Shirley was quite aware of the civil rights movement and participated in it. He did, after all, choose to go to the South because of what happened to Nat King Cole.

Vallelonga wasn’t entirely as how he appears onscreen either. He was indeed a bouncer in 1962, but he wasn’t an ignorant goomba; he merely played that role. The historical Vallelonga acted in 21 films. Some pretty good ones, in fact: The Godfather, Dog Day Afternoon, Raging Bull, Good Fellas, and Donnie Brasco ....

Given that the only two men who knew exactly what happened on that trip are no longer with us, all is open for speculation. To judge the film on its own merits, Ali and Mortensen have real chemistry. So much so, that their screen bond makes the unlikely seem possible. They also cover script holes and directorial missteps. It isn’t until after the credits roll that it occurred to me that a moment of defiance in Birmingham reminded me of Sally Field confronting the bosses in Norma Rae. Or that I had been watching History Lite.

Green Book is no masterpiece, but it’s well worth watching.  Given the tenor of our own times, maybe we need to learn lessons from the Jim Crow era all over again.

Rob Weir

* Shirley was often addressed as “Dr. Shirley” on the basis of several honorary degrees. He obtained a B.A. in music from Catholic University, but had no formal graduate-level training.