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| Mahershala Ali and Viggo Mortensen in Green Book |
Peter Farrelly's Green Book is not a bad movie, just an unoriginal one, especially with its soft-landing, feel-good ending, set at Christmas no less. It's certainly among the least worthy best picture Oscar recipients of recent years, especially from nominees that included such original works as Spike Lee's BlacKkKlansman, Alfonso Cuarón's Roma, and my personal favorite, Yorgos Lanthimos's The Favourite. What Green Book has going for it is powerful performances by Viggo Mortensen and Mahershala Ali and a sharp reminder of the cruelty and injustice of the Jim Crow era, in which a phenomenon like the Green Book, a travel guide for Black people in an age of segregated accommodation, was necessary. The film has been criticized for resorting to the White Savior trope, in which Mortensen's Tony Vallelonga saves Ali's Don Shirley from mayhem and possible death. There is, in fact, a White Savior in the film, but it's the off-screen Bobby Kennedy who rescues Vallelonga and Shirley from jail in a Louisiana "sundown town" after a well-placed phone call by Shirley to his well-connected lawyer, a moment in which Shirley plays Magical Negro to Vallelonga's White Savior. The film tries to be even-handed in depicting the growing rapport between the two men, in which each tries to correct the other's flaws, namely Shirley's hauteur and Vallelonga's crudeness. It doesn't entirely succeed, largely because the point of view in the film is white, that of Vallelonga's son Nick, who wrote the screenplay. The Shirley family, in fact, protested the treatment of their relative in the film as a "symphony of lies," falsely portraying Shirley as alienated from the Black community and estranged from his brother. Setting aside any issues of accuracy -- Green Book is a fiction film, not a documentary -- the real problems with the movie are two: One, that it treats racial tensions as a thing of the past, something hardly acceptable in the age of Black Lives Matter. The other is the heaviness of its clichés, which are those of almost any odd-couple road trip movie, which led some of its critics, mindful of another undeserving best picture Oscar winner, to dub it "Driving Dr. Shirley."
