Green Book might have been a great movie in different hands. Based on the true story of a friendship between African-American pianist Don Shirley and the Bronx-born driver Anthony “Tony Lip” Vallelonga, the movie makes some dubious choices on perspective and sharpens almost every character to such a fine point that the result feels as nuanced as an after-school special. The National Board of Review just named Green Book its best film of 2018, which is entirely fitting for a body that gave the same honor to The Post last year: They favor popular, well-acted films that talk down to the audience with positive, timely messages and avoid answering or even addressing the toughest questions around their topics.
There’s a long prologue centered on Vallelonga (Viggo Mortensen), a bouncer at the Copa Cabana, showing his boisterous family, pugnacious style at work, and gluttonous appetite, all of which is just character development of a sort before the meat of the movie begins. Shirley (Mahershala Ali, likely to get an Oscar nomination) is looking for a driver and, although he doesn’t use the term, bodyguard to take him on a tour of the Midwest and then American south, which, in 1962, was still highly segregated and thus dangerous for African-Americans traveling there. Tony and the men in his family are all typically racist of the Italian-Americans of the time – the word mulignan, a disgusting Italian-American racial slur, comes up often in the film – but, of course, Tony and Shirley grow to understand each other, becoming friends, even teaming up on a duet of “Ebony and Ivory” in the closing scene. (I may be remembering that last part wrong.)
The film is directed by Peter Farrelly, known for directing gross-out comedies with his brother, and you can see his hand all over the finished product – not in a good way. The film is slapsticky at times and grabs far too many cheap laughs around things like Tony spitting out food he doesn’t like or other peccadillos of personal hygiene. But the biggest mistake is that the script, co-written by Tony’s son, Nick, tells us a story about racism from the perspective of white people. This is not a story about race in America. There’s virtually nothing here about what it’s like to travel while black (a phrase Tony uses in the film), or simply to be black in a white man’s world, or, in Shirley’s case, to be a black man trying to succeed in a career that requires him to, in a sense, suppress his blackness. Beyond the true story of the friendship these two men developed, one that lasted fifty years beyond the time depicted here until their deaths in 2013, this is a movie about a white guy realizing what racism means at a tangible level. When Shirley says he wants Tony to drive him into the Deep South, Tony says there’s going to be trouble, but is still shocked when he sees the visceral effects of the casual racism that characterized the everyday South. (Which is not to say that racism is gone today; it’s merely hiding behind nice furniture.)
The film also plays fast and loose with too many details of the story and history, starting with condensing what was a real-life tour of nearly 18 months into a two-month whirlwind tour that ended on Christmas Eve, punctuating the film with a feel-good resolution that never happened. Shirley’s surviving relatives, including a brother mentioned in the film and a niece, say the depiction of him as estranged from his family and the black community is false, as is the idea that he had never even had fried chicken, which makes for a brief running gag in the film. There are also minor details that get in the way of the core story, such as Tony discussing Aretha as a household name in 1962 (she was only 20 and had yet to become any kind of star) to try to show Don as out of touch with popular culture.
The way the film depicts Italian-Americans is about half right – and the half it gets right is probably the important part. Italian-Americans, at least those in New York, were tight-knit, family-oriented, insular, and definitely racist and even xenophobic, not just due to outright racism – cultural prejudice in Italy was more north versus south, rather than based on skin color – but because of typical othering, the way one class that faces prejudice might find another group on which they can look down. Mortensen and the actors who portray his family members all boast an embellished bada-bing Brooklyn Italian accent, even though they’re supposed to be from the Bronx. Some of the older characters in the film speak Sicilian – I heard travagliari, the Sicilian word for work, rather than the Italian lavorare – but Mortensen speaks standard Italian with a very clean accent when he switches languages. Linda Cardellini plays Tony’s wife, Dolores, but has nothing to do except look pretty, and her accent is even more exaggerated than Mortensen’s. We do fold our pizza to eat it, because we’re not savages, just not the way Tony does in the film.
Ali’s a lock for a Best Supporting Actor nomination, and might win the award for the second time (the first was for Moonlight). He’s wonderful, because he always is, and I think he does his best to soften the depiction of Shirley as an overly fastidious, isolated person, so that the character comes across more as a person of color trying to navigate a very narrow path through a white world. Mortensen really loses himself well in Tony Lip, but without the subtlety of Ali’s performance; he might still get a nomination now that the furor over him using the n-word in a discussion about the film seems to have died down. Had the film done better at the box office, perhaps it would be a lock for a Best Picture nomination, and it still might get one, but there are going to be at least ten more worthy movies out there in what looks like a crowded year.
Finally, I didn’t like the film, but I don’t want to mislead anyone into thinking this is a terrible film. It’s a bad film compared to what I usually watch, but I don’t watch many really awful films. I skim off the top, because I’m not a professional critic and see only what I want – typically films critics have loved or that are nominated for something major. It had a CinemaScore of A+ last time I looked, and it is absolutely a crowd-pleaser sort of film, and smarter than most films that try to hit those emotional notes. I personally found it sentimental, predictable, and even schlocky at times, and I was bothered by aspects of the film that I think won’t bother most people. Your mileage – and the film has a lot of mileage in it – may vary.
If you want another perspective, Monique Judge reviewed the film for The Root, and within her review there’s a letter from Harry Belafonte praising the film, urging audiences to go see it. He feels it’s accurate to the time and place, since he performed himself across the country in that period, and that “there are many perspectives from which to tell the same story and all can be true.”