directed by Peter Farrelly
These are expanded, but essentially the same comments I made about the film during the opening of Nov. 29's "Words On Flicks" podcast.
Over the Thanksgiving weekend I saw the Peter Farrelly-directed movie Green Book, starring Viggo Mortenson as Tony "Lip" Vallelonga, who finds himself employed as a driver by Mahershala Ali's Dr. Don Shirley, a noted concert pianist, on a tour through the deep south in 1960, four years before the Civil Rights Act was passed. The film is based on Vallelonga's reminiscences of their true-life friendship; however, the family of the late Don Shirley vehemently disputes its details.
Though Green Book has gotten mostly good reviews, its controversies made me a bit trepidatious about the movie before going in. I'm sure you've heard them, but I'll reiterate here:
First, the title hijacks history.
I would have preferred that a movie with this title be much more directly related to the history of this pivotal guidebook. "The Negro Motorist Green Book" was an actual publication used by African Americans during road trips across America, and particularly in the south, during segregation and Jim Crow. An African American mailman named Victor Hugo Green from New York City came up with the idea for the book in an attempt to make road travel safer for black people, and originally published it only in the NYC metro area until demand made it national.
It was published for 30 years, from 1936 to 1966. It was, unfortunately, much-needed. Though black folks were purchasing cars so they wouldn’t have to face discrimination on public transportation, they were still subjected to humiliations in terms of where they could stop, get gas, eat, get a hotel room, or even go to the bathroom – which is shown in the film. (I saw the movie Ragtime again recently, and the major conflict of the story turns on the vandalization of an automobile owned by a black piano player (Howard Rollins) by a group of white volunteer firemen in the early 1900s.)
Though Hollywood has attempted from time to time to tackle stories about key events in black history, too often the main character is a white person and the story is told through their perspective. And so it is with Green Book, a key piece of African American history reduced to an incidental part of the narrative.
Because of this history, titling the movie Green Book is misleading, as it is the story of an initially racist white man's view of one exceptional (magical) black man. Said white man has limited experience with the Green Book, makes offhand comments about its existence, and never questions its necessity with his passenger. However briefly, the Green Book itself, which is only shown a couple of times in the film that I can remember, is a symbol for the disparity between the lives of the two men. One white, with limited education, scuffling to make ends meet, but who can freely go anywhere, and the other, a multilingual, multitalented, educated black man who faces discrimination everywhere.
1 Magical Negro + 1 White Savior = ?
Secondly, the film has been criticized for being part of a long tradition in Hollywood of movies about Magical Negroes and White Saviors. (sorry if these terms offend people).
In movies about Magical Negroes, a black character selflessly helps a white person with aspects of their life out of the goodness of their hearts. Movies like The Green Mile where falsely imprisoned Michael Clarke Duncan can literally make magical miracles for everybody on Death Row but can't get himself out of prison. I saw the film once and while many people adore it, I can't stomach it. Or The Legend of Bagger Vance with Will Smith as a wise and mystical caddy to struggling golfer Matt Damon.
White Savior movies include many narratives about people of color whose circumstances can only improve by having a white person swoop in and rescue them: Avatar, The Blind Side, The Help, Dances with Wolves, Conrack, etc. "If you've been to the movies in the last half-century, you know the White Savior genre well," notes writer David Sirota in a 2013 Salon piece. "It's the catalog of films that features white people single-handedly rescuing people of color from their plight. These story lines insinuate that people of color have no ability to rescue themselves. This both makes white audiences feel good about themselves by portraying them as benevolent messiahs (rather than hegemonic conquerors), and also depicts people of color as helpless weaklings -- all while wrapping such tripe in the cinematic argot of liberation." In other words, whether ethnic tribespeople, urban dwellers, or inner-city students, these folks cannot help themselves. While many of these films are intended to show cross-cultural acceptance, what they actually portray is that only the superior ingenuity and resourcefulness of a white person -- abetted by white privilege -- can fix the problems of people of color.
In Green Book, these two tropes of Magical Negro Meets White Savior coexist -- but do they cancel each other out? Tony Lip is the White Savior: hired to be Dr. Shirley’s driver and muscle, to literally save him from any danger, but in this story Tony feels he has to teach Dr. Shirley how to be black, i.e. teaching him how to eat fried chicken, how to identify Chubby Checker and Aretha Franklin songs -- even how to throw trash onto the highway.
Meanwhile, Dr. Shirley is a Magical Negro – an amazing and highly trained pianist, able to speak multiple languages (including the Italian Tony thinks he doesn’t understand), a sensitive writer who helps Tony compose lush love letters to his wife, and ultimately – if this film is to be believed – helping Tony overcome his innate racism. Dr. Shirley's string players help Tony see that the pianist's tour through the South is not just a musical exchange, it is a crusade of courage against long-embedded racial hatred. He is not only an exceptional person of color, he's an exceptional person of ANY color. Unfortunately, movies about exceptional people of color perpetrate the idea that they are somehow not really a member of that race and exist in a universe unto themselves.
The Racialized Awkward Road Trip Movie
But movie tropes aside, I couldn't help but like the film. It falls easily into other much-beloved movie types -- the buddy film and the road picture combined, where two opposite numbers slowly come to grudging respect for the other over the course of the forced trip. As such, Green Book provides two juicy roles for these actors to dig into, and Viggo and Mahershala are fantastic. My resistance to the racial tropes of the movie began to fade in the face of their lived-in performances. I believed the situations and their growing relationship as the road trip progressed. Dr. Shirley's personal struggles in the face of racism and loneliness were palpable, thanks to Mahershala's regal portrayal; I couldn't stop thinking about the lithe, swashbuckling version of Viggo in The Lord of the Rings trilogy of a decade ago as compared to his embodiment of this beer-bellied Bronx bouncer. There was much about their journey via car across the country that felt true in both its beauty and its ugliness.
Green Book is a film with a flawed premise that is nonetheless well-executed. Your reaction to it will no doubt be related to how well you can swallow down another major movie about black history from the perspective of a non-black protagonist.
The Music Grounds It
The film has a strong sense of place and time about it – you really feel that you are back in 1960. One of the strongest elements that made the film feel so rooted in its time period is the music. Mahershala does a great job at tickling the ivories (or at least appearing to), performing unique arrangements of popular tunes like "Tea for Two" or "Happy Talk" (from South Pacific). But it’s the incidental music with great tracks from a range of artists that helped bring the flick alive, from Little Richard, Aretha Franklin and Chubby Checker to "One Mint Julep" by the Clovers, Professor Longhair’s "Go to the Mardi Gras," and many classic Christmas recordings. Toward the end of the film, when the duo are headed back to New York City, a track that I’d never heard before was played: called “Goodbye, My Lover, Goodbye” by Robert Mosely, that I instantly fell in love with and can't get out of my head. The soundtrack also has a version of the real Don Shirley playing “The Lonesome Road,” which I believe is played over the end credits.
Listen to this clip of the real Don Shirley performing "Lullaby of Birdland" and you will get a glimmer of how astounding a musician he actually was. Though the images are not of Shirley, it's the performance (starts classical, shifts to jazz) that wows.
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