Green Book
Peter Farrelly tries his hand at something more serious than the hijinks of “Dumb & Dumber,” “There’s Something About Mary” and “Kingpin” with this road movie, and he’s been rewarded with several award nominations. I’m not sure if I would say they were deserved, but it’s nice to see a filmmaker try and stretch themselves some.
This film tells the story of an unlikely friendship between Tony “Lip” Vallelonga (Viggo Mortensen) and Dr. Don Shirley (Mahershala Ali) in 1962. Tony is a bouncer at the Copacabana night club looking for work when the club shuts down for renovations, while Dr. Shirley is an accomplished pianist going on tour. The Dr. Shirley wants Tony to drive him while he makes tour stops in the midwest and deep south, and will pay handsomely for it. Can Tony put aside his prejudice towards black people to do the job, which will take him away from his family for eight weeks leading up to Christmas? Why is Dr. Shirley doing this tour, knowing the type of discrimination he will face? Is the film really stupid enough to think we don’t know the answers to these questions?
If your first thought in reading the plot synopsis above is that this is a race-reversed “Driving Miss Daisy,” you wouldn’t really be wrong there. The screenplay by Nick Vallelonga (Tony’s son), Brian Hayes Currie and Farrelly hits so many familiar beats that, if you skipped the movie after watching the trailers alone, you would probably be forgiven for thinking you’ve seen everything the movie had to offer. With the exception of solid work by Mortensen and Linda Cardellini as his wife, and very good work by Ali as Dr. Shirley, you would truly not be missing much. A lot of people have put this film in the “white savior” trope of storytelling, but that’s not exactly true- what it does have is a very white perspective on this story, that’s what keeps it from being anything more than you think it will be. If this were just about the tour, and seen through the eyes of Dr. Shirley, I think this could have been something special and unique. By having it be through Tony’s eyes, we seem to get a lot of the same beats we do in any film about race from a white perspective. This film hits those beats decently enough, but doesn’t do anything to really make it stand out as anything worth our time.
