Worthy trip for viewers
In much the same way Jamie Cullum’s music has been described as jazz for people who don’t listen to jazz, you might say that Green Book is an ideal film for people who don’t watch them.
This isn’t an insult so much as a measure of just how breezily ingratiating Peter Farrelly’s Capra-aping, Oscar-baiting road movie can be – this Best Picture Oscar contender is so much fun in the moment, that you almost feel bad later on for realising it doesn’t add up.
It is a decisive move upmarket for the director after two decades in the gross-out game with his brother Bobby: an inspired-by-a-true-story account of the black pianist Don Shirley’s tour of the US Deep South in 1962, told from the perspective of Tony ‘Lip’ Vallelonga, his brusque ItalianAmerican chauffeur and bodyguard.
Played by Viggo Mortensen, Vallelonga is a cheerfully unreconstructed knucklehead, whose indelicate attitudes towards diversity are softened by spending a few months ferrying around a real live AfricanAmerican – Don himself, played with gliding regality by Mahershala Ali.
And the fastidious Don learns to embrace the black working-class culture he’d formerly kept at a distance, from soul food to rhythm and blues – thanks largely to Tony’s own voracious enthusiasm for both.
The Green Book itself was a pamphlet of the day with advice for “the Negro Motorist” on which restaurants and lodgings would offer a warm welcome in segregated states.
And such warmth is in short supply – even Don’s own smiling white audiences won’t let him use their bathrooms or dine in their restaurants.
Against this grim backdrop, the two men learn to set their differences aside, and the race relations cause inches forward in an indecently handsome teal Cadillac, which helps.
Think Driving Miss Daisy with the seats switched.
To the extent that Green Book works, it does so thanks to the deft comic performances of Mortensen and Ali, who clang off one another like crossed sabres, with a range of satisfying boy-oy-oings.
Tony Lip is a boisterous, string-vested caricature – fittingly, the real-life Tony Lip found work in later life as a wise-guy character actor, not least as Carmine Lupertazzi in The Sopranos.
And Don is effectively the black Frasier Crane, an aloof sophisticate whose deluxe apartment above Carnegie Hall is stowed with exotic objets.
Both Mortensen and Ali have been Oscar and Bafta nominated, and it’s the detail of their performances that make them sing: Ali’s knack for distilling a lifetime’s disdain or despair into a single look, or the attention Mortensen pays to how Tony eats – somehow everything that matters about the man is there in the way he folds an entire pizza in half before scoffing it.
Their odd-couple act works so well, in fact, that by sheer force of charisma the two are able to barrel through some deeply spurious plot turns and character moments that would have stopped lesser actors in their tracks.
The issue isn’t historical accuracy – although in line with awards-season tradition, that has itself been hotly contested.
(Shirley’s family have said the screenplay, which was coauthored by Nick Vallelonga, Tony’s son, wildly overstates the strength of the two men’s friendship.)
It’s more that Tony’s own old-fashioned attitudes are treated so indulgently, and his redemption made so painless, that you’re never sure if the film sees racism as the scourge of the US or a dead-mouse-under-the-floorboards-level nuisance that eventually sorts itself out.
Mortensen and Ali’s chemistry is built on the assumption that it requires a little give and take on both sides to get along.
But unsurprisingly, the film struggles to explain exactly what kind of ground Don should be ceding, as a black concert pianist who also happens to be gay, and is travelling through locales where any one of those three things could get him beaten or worse.
Meanwhile, Tony’s own bigotry levels begin to alter on a scene-by-scene basis. – The Telegraph