A bitter sweet tour in 1962 of the Deep South with two engaging and completely different characters.
Green Book
Grade: A-
Director: Peter Farrelly (Dumb and Dumber)
Screenplay: Farrelly, Nick Vallelonga, Bryan Hayes Currie
Cast: Viggo Mortensen (Captain Fantastic), Mahershala Ali (Moonlight).
Rating: PG-13
Runtime: 2 hr 10 min
By: John DeSando
Green Book, winner of the Toronto International Film Fest’s People’s Choice award, is the newest entry in Christmas movies, and it’s a feel-good keeper. Set against the racist rumble of the ‘60’s in the Jim Crow South, 1962 to be exact, a classically-trained black jazz pianist, Dr. Don Shirley (Mahershala Ali, think Nat King Cole), hires a Bronx mob-related Italian American, Tony (Viggo Mortensen), to drive him on a musical tour of the South.
The engaging, humorous, and insightful road trip, directed by Dumb and Dumber’s Peter Farrelly, is a reversed Driving Miss Daisy, in which driver and musician learn about their ethnic challenges and face a panorama of prejudices as each gig south of the Mason-Dixon line is fraught with restrictions on the black man’s life. Lest you think it is a traveling diatribe against good old boy racism, the narrative is only partially that.
It is as much a road picture with two men getting the better measure of their buddy, often a realization of their blessed differences and the uphill battle the black man wages daily to find a comfortable place in a white world. His isolation from his own world as a cultured musician with a room upstairs at Carnegie Hall is matched by his isolation from humanity on the road through the South.
Although Tony is a tough guy who can handle trouble for both of them, he has a tender streak that comes out in his relationship with wife Dolores (Linda Cardellini) and eventually with Dr. Shirley as the two eat Southern fried chicken and mutually abhor the racism that emerges at almost each venue. The letters to Tony’s wife, aided by Dr Shirley’s dictation, are a delightfully romantic part of the otherwise serious take on racism.
Although the world of Green Book, both film and the mid-twentieth century Negro Motorist guide for blacks to find places where they will be allowed to eat and sleep, is dotted with prejudice, the redemption is the growing affection between the road buddies and the Italian family filled with shouting and food, the eternal bridge between the different peoples. Green Book ends with Christmas eve dinner, the appropriate celebration to bring hope for the races. Although this world is yet to see earth-shattering assassinations, this film is a beginning road trip to tolerance and love.
John DeSando, a Los Angeles Press Club first-place winner for National Entertainment Journalism, hosts WCBE’s It’s Movie Time and co-hosts Cinema Classics. Contact him at JDeSando@Columbus.rr.com
