Green Book feels a bit familiar

Universal Pictures

We seem to be living in a time when relationships between people of different races has deteriorated to a pre-Civil Rights era and movies like Selma and The Birth of a Nation make valiant, if flawed, attempts to remind us of how things were to remind us that we’re doomed to repeat history if we don’t remember the past. Sometimes the films dealing with racial issues are even-handed, sometimes heavy-handed (like Crash) and sometimes with a light touch.

Green Book falls into the latter category. It takes place at a time in the past of often violent racial strife, but the movie doesn’t hit you over the head with a sledge hammer to make its point that being a racist is bad. The movie stars Viggo Mortensen as Tony ‘Lip’ Vallelonga, a bouncer at a New York night club in the early 1960s. Tony and his family are portrayed as having some racist leanings, such as when the entire neighborhood comes to his house one day to ‘protect’ the missus from two black servicemen there to repair an appliance. Dolores then shockingly offers the two men a glass of water, and Tony quietly deposits the two glasses in the trash can after the men leave (Delores retrieves them, but she’s not entirely innocent either).

When the nightclub closes for renovations during the holidays, Tony is told of a job being a driver for some doctor. Tony goes to apply for the job and is surprised to find that the doctor isn’t a medical doctor, but a ‘doctor of music’, musician Dr. Don Shirley. Tony is also surprised to see that the doctor is ‘colored’ and has a bit of an opulent lifestyle in his apartment above Carnegie Hall. Shirley tells Tony that he came highly recommended but it was obvious Tony may have some issues being a driver for a man of color. But the money is good, and even though the tour — through the Deep Sout, which means Tony will also be Dr. Shirley’s bodyguard — runs right up to Christmas Eve, he takes the job with Dolores’ blessing. Tony finds his passenger a bit of a tough nut to crack at the beginning of the journey, but the two do eventually hit it off, experiencing the highs and lows of traveling through a pre-Civil Rights South. The biggest issue Tony faces is that if the tour is not completed, he doesn’t get paid in full and the last stop finds Dr. Shirley denied entrance into the dining room for dinner … the same room he’s booked for a concert after dinner.

Green Book is very subtle in its depiction of racial tensions for the most part. Yes, there are times when Dr. Shirley is denied service in places and he does experience a violent attack after venturing into a bar where he doesn’t belong, but these things are really secondary to the story, which is the growing friendship between the two very different men (and Dr. Shirley gets himself into trouble in a YMCA for an infraction that seemed to come out of left field … and it wasn’t for a black man swimming in a pool with white people). The movie takes such a light approach to the issues of race that I doubt many people will come away thinking how bad things actually were at that time. The most interesting thing one may learn from the movie is the meaning of the film’s title: the ‘Green Book’ was a publication for black travelers listing the establishments in which they would be welcome (and some of the hotels were real fleabags). This was new information to me.

The performances are fine, but again nothing groundbreaking. Mortenson gets to have a little more personality as the very Italian New Yorker, always stuffing his face with something (going the Christian Bale method route by gaining a lot of weight for the role), finding the joys in things like having Kentucky Fried Chicken in Kentucky, while trying to actually bond with his passenger, learning over the course of their travels that Dr. Shirley is a person just like him (and Tony doesn’t even freak out over the YMCA incident). Mahershala Ali plays Don Shirley as a very staid and stoic man, someone who’s lived in a very insular world, keeping to himself most of the time, unfamiliar with his own culture (Tony says he’s more black than Don at one point because he knows the music of Chubby Checker and Aretha Franklin), and pretty uptight when it comes to enjoying the simple things in life. The point of the movie is to show us how both men change over the course of their eight weeks together (and for the record, this is based on a true story written by Tony’s son Nick). And this is where the movie succeeds the most, giving us the feel good ending of the year. Thinking about it all afterwards, I realized that Green Book is basically Driving Miss Daisy with a gender and race swap.

The film’s period detail is very nice, the direction is solid (surprisingly by Peter Farrelly, known more for his raunchy comedies with his brother Bobby), and all of the performances are fine. There’s nothing earth-shattering here, it’s just a pleasant road trip that will actually give you a little lift after seeing it, and may even make you want to seek out the music of Dr. Don Shirley (and how many people today can honestly say they’ve ever heard of the man?). I know the movie is being touted for awards season — and recently scored a Best Picture win from the National Board of Review, as well as a nomination for the GOlden Globes (in the comedy category … I mean, it’s humorous at times but a comedy?) — but while it’s a competently made movie with good acting and a nice story, I’d put several other films above as the best of the year. But it’s still worth giving a look, just don’t expect your life to change because of it. The most surprising thing about the movie is its R-rating.

Green Book has a run time of 1 hour 46 minutes and is rated R for horror violence and bloody images, language, brief drug use and nudity.