Unlikely friends navigate racism
Mahershala Ali, Viggo Mortensen play real-life pair in ‘Green Book’
The 1962 turquoise Cadillac that Oakland-born Oscar winner Mahershala Ali, as jazz pianist Don Shirley, and Viggo Mortensen, as his driver Tony Vallelonga, a.k.a. Tony Lip, tool around in on rural roads in Peter Farrelly’s “Green Book” is a character all its own.
Just imagine a white man chauffeuring a black man in the deeply segregated Jim Crow South of 1962. The car ensures that the pair will be noticed.
“It was a little bit of a squeeze getting into the back of that car. As big as it looks, it wasn’t particularly comfortable,” says Ali, who won a supporting actor Oscar for “Moonlight.” “But it’s the greatest gift to an actor when you have the tools of ward-
“Green Book” opens at Bay Area theaters on Friday, Nov. 16. A Tribute to Viggo Mortensen: 7 p.m., $15-20. Tuesday, Nov. 20. Castro Theatre, 429 Castro St., S.F. www.sffilm.org
robe and the production. The car is part of the production design. That was a very conscious choice to have a blue Cadillac instead of a black one.”
“Green Book,” which Farrelly co-wrote with Tony Vallelonga’s son, Nick, and Brian Hayes Currie, is based in fact, that tour marking the start of a lifelong friendship between the erudite, gay musician and the crude, affable family man. The title refers to the guide in those pre-Civil Rights Act days that advised African Americans how to travel safely in the South and where they could stay and dine.
The film, whose numerous awards include the audience awards at the Toronto International Film Festival and the Mill Valley Film Festival, is considered an Oscar contender. But its odds of winning may have taken a dive on Nov. 7 when Mortensen — who will be honored by SFFilm along with a screening of the movie on Tuesday, Nov. 20, with “A Tribute to Viggo Mortensen” — used a racial epithet while attempting to make a point about racism during an onstage post-screening discussion with Ali, Farrelly and moderator Elvis Mitchell.
Mortensen apologized. Ali, though he said he was hurt by the language from his co-star and friend, has accepted the apology.
Although Mortensen’s words may have hurt the Oscar chances of “Green Book,” neither Farrelly nor his cast signed on to win prizes. The actors were attracted to the big picture behind their characters and the story, and Farrelly was intrigued when Currie — an actor in Farrelly Brothers comedies like “Me, Myself & Irene” — first told him the story.
Tony Lip, in fact, is a guy people know even if they don’t realize it. As big a character in real life as Mortensen portrays onscreen, he eventually became an actor with parts in “Goodfellas,” “Donnie Brasco” and several episodes of “The Sopranos,” in which he played Carmine Lupertazzi. Farrelly loved the choices Tony made that led eventually to his association with Shirley.
“Even though Tony started as a racist, like most people at that time, he did have a moral code and he never crossed over into the mob,” Farrelly says. “He was good friends with all those guys. He knew them his whole life. He knew John Gotti, but he wouldn’t get into that life because of his family. It was a lot of temptation.”
Son of a Danish father, Mortensen wasn’t convinced initially that he could even play an Italian American. The actor, perhaps perhaps most famous as the heroic Aragorn in the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, eventually packed on 45 pounds and spent a lot of time among the Vallelonga family to learn the ways of Tony.
Despite his misgivings, he loved the script, with its unusual take on a place and an era. Shirley’s tour took place a year after the Freedom Riders traveled to the South to protest segregation and the same year the University of Mississippi at Oxford ended segregation with the enrollment of James Meredith.
“I found myself, even on the first read, literally laughing out loud, and sometimes being taken by surprise, being very moved by certain things,” Mortensen says. “We see lots of movies that deal with the civil-rights-era, precivil-rights-era South, and racial discrimination and so forth, but the way ‘Green Book’ handles those issue is to some degree new.
“Don Shirley is unusual. He lives in a very isolated way, and as he himself describes it, he’s not black enough, not white enough, not man enough.”
And although audiences respond to the buddy movie unreeling before them, Ali sees the tragedy of Shirley’s life and his transcendence of it. A child prodigy and classical musician who studied in Leningrad, he turned to jazz when discrimination kept him off the classical stage. He spoke eight languages, lived in a luxurious apartment above Carnegie Hall and was friends with the Kennedys, but he was also a gay man when it wasn’t legal (and still considered a mental illness) and so well educated that he didn’t fit in anywhere. Ali calls it Shirley’s “alien status.”
At the same time, Ali sees a black man who made the decision to undertake a tour in a place where he knew he would endure discrimination. The decision was a conscious one; the gift to movie audiences nearly 60 years later is to be able to see that segregated world from a black man’s perspective and from Tony’s, whose biases are challenged as his eyes are opened.
“When we do period pieces, you don’t see a black person who has the power to say no,” says Ali. “He didn’t need that money, he didn’t need that tour. That was — in his own mind, coming from his point of view, his circumstance, his experience — a choice.”
unusual “Don Shirley . ... As is he himself describes it, he’s not black enough, not white enough.” Viggo Mortensen