Sunday, December 9, 2018

"Green Book"

  

Is this really 2018? Watching Green Book makes the question relevant: Here is a big studio awards-season film about racism in America made by white men and told from the perspective of a white man. Two years after Moonlight won Best Picture, Green Book seems related far less to that film than to the Best Picture winner from almost three decades ago, Driving Miss Daisy.

It is heartfelt, warm and touching. That is sincere praise. It's engaging and sweet, very well made, eminently enjoyable. Does it seem at all odd that as we approach the second decade of the 21st century, Hollywood still finds it impossible to make a movie about America's race problem that is something other than warm, touching, sweet and heartfelt and seen through the eyes of the straight white man?

Green Book would be something much more than problematic if it weren't for the presence of Mahershala Ali, who delivers a performance that is rich, nuanced, insightful, careful, contemplative, complex and human, qualities that don't seem intrinsic to the words he speaks. The screenplay, which is credited to Nick Vallelonga, Brian Hayes Currie and director Peter Farrelly, doesn't know what to make of the character Ali plays, the real-life musician Dr. Don Shirley.

Here are some facts about Dr. Shirley, which are briefly recounted in the film: He was 2 when he started playing the piano. He was 9 when his mother died and he was invited to study music theory in Russia. You read that right: 9 years old. He received a doctorate in music, psychology and liturgical studies. He worked as a psychologist. He was taken under the wing of Arthur Fiedler.

He was an astounding, fascinating person.

And he's not the main character of Green Book.

No, instead, Green Book is about a boorish, uneducated racist Italian man who becomes a better person when Shirley hires him to be his driver on a concert tour through the Deep South. Shirley believes that if he commits himself to touring the South, he will change hearts and minds. This motivation is explained in the film not by Shirley but by one of the white musicians who is part of the Don Shirley Trio.

Ali plays Shirley with fierce commitment, with passion and complexity -- even though for the first two-thirds of the movie he's meant to be little more than the comic foil to Viggo Mortensen's Tony "Lip" Vallelonga (whose son wrote the film). He's prim, precise, fussy, effete, yet somehow Ali makes him feel deeply alive and compassionate, despite the movie's weird insistence that this isn't really his story. Green Book offers absolutely no insight into Shirley, though through some extraordinary miracle of acting Ali makes him believable and three-dimensional despite almost never gets a moment on screen to himself; Tony, with his cartoonish New York Italian accent and insatiable appetite, is always there to steal the spotlight.

Green Book seems endlessly fascinated with Tony's private life, with his sweet and patient wife (Linda Cardellini), with his lack of education and his enormous belly -- but the groundbreaking, multi-lingual musician who refuses to accept his country's hateful racism is the secondary player. He calm and steady force in the backseat who encourages Tony to be better, to exhibit a semblance of the self-awareness that the musician seems to have in endless supply.

But somehow, Ali finds a depth that is only hinted at in the screenplay itself. His may be the performance of the year, if only because he does so much with so little.  Green Book is at its best as it watches the friendship between the two men develop, and when it's just the two men on screen there are times when the movie is downright wonderful.

Keep in mind, though, that Green Book is named for "The Negro Motorist Green Book," which listed the places that black Americans could safely travel during a time of open discrimination. Green Book is about an America that made it impossible for someone as educated, accomplished and talented as Shirley to exist safely. It is about a deeply disturbing, shocking, shameful period in America's history that is not as far removed as we may think -- never mind the fact that as a throwaway plot point Green Book also notes that Shirley was gay, or at least bisexual.

The ways that Shirley was disallowed to be himself, the ways in which he experienced unthinkable discrimination, and the sense of self that gave him extraordinary presence despite every disadvantage, is not the point of Green Book. This movie isn't about those things.

Instead, Green Book is about a white man who is so racist that at the beginning of the film he throws away two glasses because black men have drunk from them, and it's about how his experience with Dr. Don Shirley teaches him how to open his mind and heart to the humanity of a black man. It's about how his casual racism doesn't really count because it's not as bad as what happened in the South, and it's about how Tony becomes a better man by seeing how Shirley is treated.

There's a moment when the two men find themselves in a "sundown" town, where black people were not allowed on the street after sunset. They get arrested, and when Shirley insists on making his one phone call, it turns out the person he calls is Bobby Kennedy, the attorney general of the United States.

Green Book isn't about how Don Shirley became a man who knew the attorney general and his brother, the president, but still couldn't sit in a restaurant with his white driver.  Green Book isn't about that man, it's about how Tony learns that when he accepts Shirley as an equal, his heart grows bigger and his life gets better.

The most frustrating part of Green Book is that despite all that, Green Book is not terrible. It is affecting. It's enjoyable. But is "enjoyable" the best we can expect from a movie about a subject like this?  Green Book is a crowd pleaser, make no doubt -- even while it leaves the most relevant, vibrant, interesting and meaningful part of itself in the back seat.



Viewed December 9, 2018 -- AMC Sunset 5

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