Music tale lacking in harmony
Review
Green Book (M, 130 mins) Directed by Peter Farrelly Reviewed by Graeme Tuckett ★★1⁄2
In 1962, the black popular/ classical pianist Don Shirley decided to tour the deep south of the United States. Segregation and hatred were rampant. Hundreds of towns and provincial cities from Louisiana south were still officially or unofficially ‘‘sundown towns’’, where any black man found outside after sunset could be arrested.
Shirley could have earned better money if he had stayed home in New York City, playing to adoring audiences on Park Avenue, but this tour was intended to prove a point, if not actually provoke.
Shirley knew he would need a driver and minder. He employed the ex-head of security at New York’s Copacabana Nightclub, Tony ‘‘Lip’’ Vallelonga.
Shirley and Vallelonga were chalk and cheese. Shirley was educated, urbane, multi-lingual, liberal, a musical prodigy and a man who moved easily in the company of royalty and presidents. Vallelonga was Bronx to his bones, a self-described bigot and a man who communicated with his fists.
Green Book is a road trip movie, a mismatched buddy comedy and an occasionally likeable parable of America today and over the past 50-plus years.
The Green Book of the title was a publication – it remained in print until 1966 – that listed for black travellers all the hotels and motels in the south that would allow them to stay, or at which they might be safe. Let that sink in for a minute.
At its best, Green Book is an oddly light-hearted take on a period in American history – one we can argue is not done yet – in which skin colour meant more than anything else in defining the trajectory of your life.
Shirley didn’t rise above racism by any average amount of talent or application. He was a once-ina-generation prodigy who even a society founded on racism couldn’t help but acknowledge. But in the south, the same concert hall management who found Shirley a Steinway piano still wouldn’t let him use an inside toilet.
The greatest weakness of Green Book is that it insists on trying to find the humour in nearly every situation Shirley and Vallelonga encounter. Director Peter Farrelly (There’s Something About Mary ) is either unequipped or unwilling to tackle the sheer ugliness of much of this material. That approach weakens the entire film.
By comparison, Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman was a far tougher and more heart-stopping film than Green Book, but it was also a hell of a lot funnier.
In the leads, Mahershala Ali (Moonlight) and Viggo Mortensen (The Lord of the Rings trilogy) both do awards-ready work. Mortensen is especially well-served by a script that offers the story as far more Vallelonga’s journey than Shirley’s.
What Ali could have done with a more sharply drawn character we will never know. Producer and cowriter Nick Vallelonga – Tony’s son – must be justifiably proud of getting his how-Dad-learned-tostop-being-racist fable to the screen. But the greater evil of generational racism goes mostly ignored and unexamined.