Sentimental, yes. But this ‘Driving Miss Daisyin reverse’ really works
Green Book C ert: 12A 2hrs 10mins
When it comes to the current awards season, Green Book is certainly emerging as a serious contender. It has already won three Golden Globes – including best supporting actor for Mahershala Ali – is in contention for four Baftas at next weekend’s star-festooned ceremony and has no fewer than five Oscar nominations to its name, including a highly coveted nod for best picture.
Thankfully, it also turns out to be a watchable and thoroughly enjoyable sort of film, of a type you weren’t quite sure they made any more. Yes, it’s sentimental and more than a tad simplistic, suggesting as it almost does that all a cultured black man needed to survive in the racist American Deep South of the early Sixties was a white Italian thug with a big right hook.
But it’s a better and more important film than that makes it sound, as you’d expect from a production that numbers the prominent black actress Octavia Spencer – star of The Help and Hidden Figures – among its executive producers.
The fact that the story is told primarily from the perspective of said white Italian thug and that the film is directed and cowritten by the white film-maker Peter Farrelly doesn’t seem to have bothered her, so I don’t think it should bother us over-much either.
Race and racial discrimination, however, are absolutely central to a story set in the early Sixties and based loosely on true events, which saw an Italian nightclub bouncer known as Tony Lip hired to drive the brilliant black pianist Don Shirley on a twomonth tour of the American Midwest before taking a hard and potentially dangerous left turn into Southern states, as yet untroubled by ‘civil rights’. Thank goodness the pair have The Green Book, a travel guide of safe places for black visitors to sleep and eat, to guide them.
There’s no doubt the film takes a while to get going, struggling to emerge from the cinematic clichés of tough Italian Americans who always live in the Bronx, wear their vests to eat dinner and seem to survive on an endless diet of meatballs. Just like Mama used to make, of course.
Only the endemic racism makes us sit up and take notice, with Lip’s extended family referring to two black workers who come to relay his kitchen floor as ‘egg plants’ and Lip tossing the glasses
‘Shirley soon realises Lip is a good man to have on your side in a tight corner’
they drank from straight into the bin. You can tell that In The Heat
Of The Night, the multiple Oscarwinning drama of racial tensions starring Sidney Poitier and Rod Steiger, won’t be made for another six years.
We only get properly under way when our unlikely couple finally hit the road, with the refined and cultured Shirley (Ali) tucked comfortably under a travel blanket on the back seat while the chain-smoking, fast food-gobbling, endlessly talking Lip (New York-born Viggo Mortensen) drives reluctantly up front. The macho white man can’t quite believe that he’s a chauffeur for a black musician but, hey, the money’s good, the nightclub is closed for renovations and he wants to look after his lovely wife, Dolores (Linda Cardellini), and their children. Whaddaya goin’ to do? Anyone who feels a film in which two men initially clash angry heads only to learn from each other and unexpectedly arrive at a position of mutual respect and friendship coming on is absolutely right. And if that makes it sound like Driving Miss Daisy, only with roles and races reversed… well, it is a bit. Lip quickly learns to appreciate Shirley’s musical genius (a virtuoso blend of jazz and classical) and his way with words, while Shirley soon appreciates that Lip is a good man to have on your side in a tight corner. Of which there are soon several. Farrelly, of course, is best known for crude but popular comedies such as There’s Something About Mary, Shallow Hal and Dumb And Dumber, and, while it’s good to see him graduating to grown-up dramas, a slight lack of subtlety definitely remains. Characters are drawn in broad brush strokes while individual scenes – a racist confrontation here, a rebuff there – flirt perilously close to genre cliché.
But it does all work, with Mortensen and Ali both deserving of the multiple nominations they have picked up, and the film having a popular appeal that doesn’t always march hand-inhand with awards success.
Ali, who won the Oscar for best supporting actor for Moonlight a couple of years ago, is particularly good, and it will be interesting to see if his performance – or indeed the film – sparks any sort of revival in Shirley’s genre-defying and currently rather out-of-fashion music, which Lip at one point describes to his wife as ‘like Liberace, only better’. Oscar Peterson meets Michel Legrand might be closer to the mark, but it’s definitely a lot of notes.
The last 10 minutes arrive layered in enough snow and Yuletide sentimentality to deter the sort of cerebral audience put off by such simplistic things. But not me – I love a film where the world seems a slightly better place by the end.