Redefining the dramedy
Writer-director known for comedies takes on the weighty Jim Crow era
Peter Farrelly helped usher in a new era of raunchy and ridiculous comedies, the kind where idiots get their tongues stuck on icy poles and nervous teenagers endure painful prom-date catastrophes.
But now, the director and cowriter of Dumb and Dumber and There’s Something About Mary has turned his attention to a very different kind of movie: a historical drama that deals with weighty issues of race and class, stars an Academy Award winner and nominee and is racking up film festival prizes.
Green Book stars Mahershala Ali as a concert pianist and Viggo Mortensen as the Bronx bouncer who drives him through the Deep South for a tour. The movie takes its name from The Negro Motorist Green-Book, the travel guide that helped African-Americans travel during the Jim Crow era.
“It’s definitely a departure from what I’ve done, but it wasn’t like I thought at that point my life, ‘You know, I should do something different,’” co-writer and director Farrelly said. “By the way, I should have been thinking that way, but I didn’t. It’s just that the heavens gave it to me.”
The heavens embodied by Brian Currie, that is.
In 2015, film director Nick Vallelonga told his longtime friend Currie the story of how his father was the driver for a world-renowned New York musician.
The record company had hired Tony Lip, the toughest bouncer at the Copacabana nightclub, to make sure Don Shirley, a black pianist, would safely make it to his concert gigs during a 1962 tour through the segregated South, where travelling was perilous for black Americans.
They decided to write a screenplay, and Currie soon told Farrelly, whom he had met while acting in his movies.
“He couldn’t get it off his head,” Currie recalled. “From then on, he just kept calling me, like, ‘Brian, forget about everything else ... keep telling me about the Don Shirley and Tony Lip story.’”
Shirley was a musical prodigy with refined tastes who held several honorary degrees, and Lip was an Italian-American who lived in the Bronx and had prejudiced attitudes. “(Currie) said they went on the road together, and a lot happened, and they became friends,” Farrelly recalled. “I was like, really?! This guy, a black concert pianist and the racist bouncer became friends? ... That’s the thing that grabbed me.”
Farrelly joined the writing team, and they pored over recorded interviews of Lip and Shirley (both men died in 2013). Later on, Ali was instrumental in offering changes to dialogue. “A genius is playing a genius,” Currie said. “He took it upon himself to say, ‘OK, this is how I feel Dr. Shirley would be.’”
Farrelly said he wasn’t any more nervous making a drama dealing with such fraught themes than he was when he made comedies. “It’s just a different story, but it didn’t feel like starting over. It felt like a continuation of what I did,” he said. “I entered this in the same state of anxiety, to make sure you’re doing everything you can to make the movie as good as it can be.”
It’s not uncommon for comedy writers and directors to shift to drama and get critical acclaim (Adam McKay’s The Big Short and Jordan Peele’s Get Out both won Oscars), but the trend is especially prevalent recently: Jonah Hill’s Mid90s and David Gordon Green’s Halloween both came out this fall.
The industry has seen the decline of the kinds of hit summer comedies that used to be so commonplace when Farrelly and his brother Bobby helped reshape the genre.
And perhaps the sorts of features that characterized Farrelly brothers comedies wouldn’t fly today in an era of intense scrutiny and rapid social-media controversies.
Although Green Book is decidedly a drama, there’s humour laced throughout.
That wasn’t an element Farrelly set out to incorporate; in fact, he and his co-writers went out of their way not to add gags, and instead focused on the odd-couple chemistry.
“There are no jokes in this. Anything that comes out of this is organic, character-driven — it’s a thing between these two guys,” Farrelly said. “On paper, this wasn’t as funny as the movie turned out to be.”
The nuanced performances of Mortensen and Ali “elevated it,” Farrelly said. “They took little smiles and turned them into laughs.”
Ali’s Shirley serves as the straight man to Mortensen’s Lip, getting laughs from a simple eyebrow raise or smirk. It helped that Lip had naturally funny tendencies, especially in his relationship with food. Mortensen eats on screen a lot; he gained 25 pounds before filming, and then another 20 during the seven-week shoot, a likely outcome after folding an entire pizza in half and eating it like a sandwich.
It’s a good thing the movie ended up having as many laughs as it did, the filmmakers said, because they make the film accessible. They give breaks from the heavier scenes that show the dangers of travelling for black people in an era of sundown towns.
Farrelly “never set out to make a message movie,” he said, “but while we were making the movie, you start recognizing what you’re doing here.”