Loosely based on true events, it stars Viggo Mortensen as Tony Lip, a fast-talking Italian American bouncer, fixer, family man, and local hot-dog eating legend, who, in need of rent money in New York in 1962, takes a job driving a sophisticated African American musician on his tour of the heavily segregated Deep South. The musician, jazz pianist Don Shirley, has had his people ask around, and Lip is the name that comes back as someone who can handle whatever is thrown at him, which Shirley knows will be important for the tour. Lip is racist - casually, and not so casually - but he is a professional, in loose terms, when the money is right, and for this one the money is decidedly right.
Cue a road trip in the company of the two, with Shirley, played by Mahershala Ali, as the apollonion picture of reserve, restraint, elegance, and logic, and Lip the dionysian "bullshit artist" chomping down fast food, smoking, belching, telling crude jokes - and protecting Shirley from local rednecks who object to what they see as an uppity negro with ideas above his station.
Odd couple buddy pic, road movie, journey of redemption, feel-good comedy - the film aims for familiar grooves, but it rolls right into these grooves nicely, hitting every cue where it needs to. There's a reason formulas become codified. Like jazz standards, they provide the framework within which artists can experiment. Like driving trips, they offer a roadmap showing the destination, the route you'll be taking, the structure allowing you to have fun along the way.
Green Book is bags of fun. Director Peter Farrelly, better known as half of the Farrelly brothers, the duo behind raucous 90s gross-out comedies Dumb and Dumber and There's Something About Mary et al, here brings colour and verve to the picture, breaking out from an opening that feels more 60s pastiche (if your first scene involves a fight between mafia hoodlums on a lively night at the Copa, let's be honest, you're only ever inviting unfavourable comparisons to Goodfellas) to eventually feel more embedded, and embodied.
Farrelly's comedic pedigree means the gentle humour, which could easily have fallen as a clumsy attempt to lighten the mood, here is baked into the piece, giving the film a confident tone - primarily dramatic rather than comedic, but with comedy and warmth, or at least their memory, always evident, even in the darkest scenes.
So Farrelly is a conductor, directing proceedings with an assured yet light touch. But it is the two leads who truly shine. Mortensen has a grand time with Lip, his obscene gut hanging out over his belt, his gait uninhibited yet purposeful, one hand perennially raising the end of a fag to his mouth while the other bums more smokes, or caresses a steering wheel, or clenches into a fist. The performance, treading close to pitfalls of caricature, ends up more nuanced, more whole - affectionate, yes, and big and broad, but full of depth.
Mahershala Ali, so great in everything in which I've seen him, has the quieter part here, but one with no less impact. He plays Don Shirley with the poise and principle and self-control befitting a world-renowned musician, every action deliberate, every movement seemingly drilled through long and disciplined training. Ali's Shirley is educated, erudite, perhaps a genius in his field. And yet he is lonely, his efforts separating him from his fellow man, his discipline distancing him from the simple pleasures of the world that the crude and coarse Lip has no problem enjoying daily.
And Shirley is black. Through herculean effort, and by playing the entertainer for affluent white audiences, he has won a renown that allows him in some way to transcend the barriers of race of the age. In one scene a row of poor black field workers stand and stare, amazed, at the broken down Cadillac that pulls into the side of the road and disgorges an overweight white guy in rolled up sleeves to work on the engine as, cool and calm in the back, a nattily dressed black man waits with legs crossed for the journey to resume.
And yet he is black. And this simple fact alone means that, despite every other fact about him, he cannot stay in the same hotels as his chauffeur, use the same toilets, eat in the same restaurants. In fact he must take a guidebook with him - the Green Book of the title - that offers tips on how to travel the southern states as a negro.
How Shirley approaches such gargantuan inequalities, whether all the poise in the world means a damn in the face of such endemic racism, provides a major theme for the film.
As a comment on racial injustice it is an unsubtle, albeit effective, piece of rhetoric. But I guess we need rhetoric for just causes, because heaven knows there is enough whispering to us for unjust ones. Stories let you step into the shoes of a person other than yourself and walk around for a while, experience another's joys, wince at the evils enacted upon them. There is no better way to engender empathy than with stories. And there are still so many people in the world who need more empathy. It is the accumulation of simple yet relatable stories, about people who on the surface appear different from us, and yet are not, that slowly changes the world.
So I can't fault Green Book for being broad, unsubtle. And what could have been mere didacticism, worthy yet uninspiring, through the strength of the two main performances grows into something warmer and richer. Within Farrelly's world, Ali's Shirley and Mortensen's Lip come to life, you feel them bond, you grow to love them, and you believe in them. More than black and white, African and Italian, the two characters end up as simply human: two flawed yet intriguing melodies, at first playing in different keys, slowly beginning to align.
Yes, as with a musical standard, we have heard the melodies, the overall tune, before. But it's difficult to not appreciate notes played with such gusto. As with Apollo and Dionysus, it is through the enjoining of the two sides of the dichotomy that a fullness of life is reached. You hear two individual voices, and then the space between the two lines up, and there is harmony.
Kurt Vonnegut once said that it is a plausible mission of artists to make people appreciate being alive at least a little bit. I feel that the makers of Green Book would agree.
Great review.
ReplyDeleteThis has made me want to watch this film. Beautifullu written as always.
ReplyDeleteThank youuu! :)
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