‘Green Book’ rings true as a tale from the Jim Crow South.
Elegant black man, earthy white guy tour Jim Crow South in ‘Green Book’
It’s hard to describe what’s so great about “Green Book.” It’s about two guys on a road trip. One is white, and one is black. One drives, and the other sits in the back. The year is 1962, and they’re on a tour through the Deep South. Things happen, but nothing too dramatic. People change, but not that much.
Yet there’s something so deeply right about this movie, so true to the time depicted and so welcome in this moment; so light in its touch, so properly respectful of its characters, and so big in its spirit, that the movie acquires a glow. It achieves that glow slowly, but by the middle and certainly by the end, it’s there, the sense of something magical happening, onscreen and within the audience.
It’s based on a real-life event. An Italian American bouncer at the premier New York nightclub of the time, the Copacabana — needing to make a few bucks while the Copa was shuttered for renovations — was hired by the
African American jazz pianist Don Shirley to act as his chauffeur for a concert tour. Going through the South was a risky proposition at the time, and hiring a chauffeur with some extra muscle seemed like a good idea.
Viggo Mortensen plays the chauffeur, known by the moniker Tony Lip, and though, in his normal incarnation, Mortensen seems about as Italian as a frosty pint of Carlsberg, he transforms for this movie. He darkened his hair (that’s the easy part), gained at least 40 pounds (that was the fun part) and then did the really hard work of assuming an entire other essence, not only a different way of speaking, but the whole atmosphere and worldview that goes with that speech.
He is well-matched by Mahershala Ali, who plays Shirley as a deeply sensitive artist with a roiling inner life, one whose personality seems an elaborate construction to ward off pain and deflect attack. He has stiff manners and precise diction, and when he smiles, he seems to be trying not to smile. He never drops his guard, but he still puts away almost a fifth of Cutty Sark every night.
Obviously, these are two men who are very different and might benefit from each other’s company. But human beings are more complicated than movies usually give them credit for, and so the ways in which they influence and help each other are different than you might expect. For example, at the start of the movie, Tony has some racist ideas and attitudes, but the movie is not about how Tony decides not to be racist, (1) because he never saw himself in that way; and (2) because the reflexive racism in his 1960s Italian American milieu is a mile wide but a millimeter thick. Just one friendly contact, one glimpse of a bigger world, and it goes away as if it were never there.
Likewise, Don doesn’t need Tony to tell him he should loosen up. There’s no scene in this movie where Tony has some woman lead Don onto the dance floor. People are deep, and human connections are rich. “Green Book” finds those depths.
Much of “Green Book” takes place on the road, and somehow director Peter Farrelly makes even the landscapes look like 1962 — they have a pastel quality that we associate with the film stock of that time. The movie takes its title from a travel book that instructed black motorists where they could find hotels and motels that catered to a mixed or black clientele. In the South, Don finds himself in the mind-boggling position of playing to audiences that treat him like a visiting lord, and yet he can’t use the restrooms in the very places in which he performs.
The screenplay has a brilliant line that cuts to the heart of the situation. Don says the people invite him because they want to feel that they have culture. But then they go back to their real culture, which is that of the Jim Crow South.
Nick Vallelonga, the first named screenwriter on the credits, is the son of Tony Lip, and he and Farrelly and everyone connected to “Green Book” capture the Italian American atmosphere of the era. On a personal note, I’m a little too young to remember 1962, but I can dimly remember 1964 and 1965 — the clothes, the loud characters, the holiday commotion in the kitchen, the explosive laughter at the dinner table. It’s all here. Likewise, Linda Cardellini plays Tony Lip’s wife, but I kept feeling like she was playing my mother. Whatever she was playing, it was authentic.
One last point, only because you’d probably want to know. Late in life, Tony Lip became an actor, and if you watched “The Sopranos,” you might have seen him. He played the old gang boss, Carmine Lupertazzi.