Green Book (2018)
Directed by Peter Farrelly
Tony Lip, a bouncer in 1962, is hired to drive pianist Don Shirley on a tour through the Deep South in the days when African Americans, forced to find alternate accommodations and services due to segregation laws below the Mason-Dixon Line, relied on a guide called The Negro Motorist Green Book.
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What critics say influenced Green Book
This misjudgment fails to reverse the lachrymose gimmick of Driving Miss Daisy.
An old-fashioned racial mash-up of Driving Miss Daisy and Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, Green Book is an exceedingly pleasant two-hander that soars off the pinball chemistry of stars Viggo Mortensen and Mahershala Ali.
Working from a screenplay he co-wrote with Brian Hayes Currie and Nick Vallelonga (son of Tony), Farrelly plays the thing as a buddy road trip/love story—equal parts Driving Miss Daisy, Pygmalion and The Odd Couple—in which the sophisticated, erudite Shirley puts up with Tony “Lip,” a crass, two-fisted galoot who can barely string together a sentence but rarely needs to as a former bouncer at New York’s legendary Copacabana nightclub.
At other times we can see them as the two very different people in Driving Miss Daisy.
Coming to this review of Green Book days into the film’s theatrical release and months after its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, you've likely heard about some of the problems Peter Farrelly’s inversion of Driving Miss Daisy poses to the enlightened critic.
Because the white guy, an erstwhile nightclub bouncer named Frank Anthony Vallelonga and known as Tony Lip (Viggo Mortensen), is behind the wheel of a car while the black guy, the pianist and composer Don Shirley (Mahershala Ali), rides in back, “Green Book” seems to invite comparison to “Driving Miss Daisy.”
Initially, the film seems doomed to be an annoying “Driving Miss Daisy” spin on “The Odd Couple.”
The movie borrows its tropes, and its comedy, from “The Odd Couple,” but its mismatch sometimes turns earnest, as when Don reproaches Tony for staying outside a mansion and playing craps with other—black—drivers. (“They didn’t have a choice whether to be inside or out; you did”).
Together, the two create a magical chemistry on screen with buddy comedy reminiscent of Gene Saks’ “The Odd Couple” (1968), making Ali the tidy Felix to Mortensen’s uncouth Oscar.
“Green Book” (★★★½ out of four; rated PG-13; in select cities Friday including New York, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Washington and Chicago; nationwide Nov. 21) offers shades of “The Odd Couple,” “Planes, Trains and Automobiles” and a race-flipped “Driving Miss Daisy.”
The film is a bit like “The Odd Couple” joined to a 21st century version of “Driving Miss Daisy,” with superior acting by two of today’s top actors — Viggo Mortensen and Mahershala Ali — sealing the bargain.
At times they remind us of the squabbling runaway convicts in The Defiant Ones (1958).
Similar figures can be identified in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner and The Defiant Ones, where Sidney Poitier’s characters go to unreasonable lengths to console and save bigoted white folk, assuring the addressed (white) viewer that no matter how hateful their actions, no matter how unspeakable the history of their country’s racism, the established order will not come under threat.
But its pedigree is slightly different, reaching back through the Gene Wilder-Richard Pryor comedies of the 1970s to “The Defiant Ones” in 1958, which starred Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis as runaway convicts in the Jim Crow South.
If you can imagine a mash-up of “Driving Miss Daisy” with “The Defiant Ones,” you’ll have some idea of what “Green Book” is like.
Much like The Help (2011), this movie condemns racism as if it’s an easy fix that was solved long ago and not an ongoing complicated struggle.
A play-it-safe crowd-pleaser in the family-friendly vein of “Hidden Figures” and “The Help” — movies that condemn racism as if the problem were already solved rather than still alive and well — “Green Book” may as well be “Driving Miss Daisy” in reverse, focusing on the inevitable fireworks when an elegant black man hires an ill-mannered guy from the Bronx to drive him around the South.
I walked out of “Green Book” thinking I had just seen one of the biggest eventual hits of TIFF—this movie has what I would call the “10th Best Picture Nominee” potential a la “The Blind Side” and “ The Help ” in that it’s wildly crowdpleasing with the kind of easy-to-swallow message that a lot of critics will consider pandering and problematic while mainstream America eats it up.
Those who saw powerful character catharsis in The Help but found distasteful its scene of shit literally served to racists?
Recent films such as Loving and Hidden Figures have explored falsehoods as well as expectations, but films like The Help can also minimize impact by making “casual racism” seem quaint and old-fashioned, most often when the lead character is white.
Better, it oftentimes feels authentic and real, Farrelly rarely pandering to the audience in overtly sentimental or mawkish ways that could transform this story into a distaff Driving Miss Daisy meets The Help variation.
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And when they do speak -- Tony sounding like an extra from “The Sopranos,” Dr. Shirley eloquently suggesting “In the Heat of the Night”-era Sidney Poitier -- you can feel your pulse quicken.
You’d be forgiven if watching this film you were reminded of films like In the Heat of the Night or Driving Miss Daisy , which features none of the hard edges one would expect from modern explorations of race relations during the Civil Rights Era.
For, the Oscar winning film that “Green Book” really hearkens back to is from decades earlier, the 1967 Best Picture winner, “In the Heat of the Night.”
Green Book has echoes of other films such as Driving Miss Daisy, In the Heat of the Night, Hidden Figures, The Help and The Blind Side, among those that come to mind.
I walked out of “Green Book” thinking I had just seen one of the biggest eventual hits of TIFF—this movie has what I would call the “10th Best Picture Nominee” potential a la “The Blind Side” and “ The Help ” in that it’s wildly crowdpleasing with the kind of easy-to-swallow message that a lot of critics will consider pandering and problematic while mainstream America eats it up.
Much like other mainstream movies that depict racism that it’ll be inevitably compared to like The Blind Side and The Help, Green Book attempts to showcase its subject matter in a sugar-coated manner as if times weren’t that rough for African-Americans back then.
A well intentioned and certainly entertaining crowd pleaser, Green Book belongs to the same cinematic pedigree as films like Driving Miss Daisy, The Help, and The Blind Side; movies where a white person and a black person will reach a common form of human understanding during times of racial segregation or hardship.
In the ignoble tradition of “Crash,” “The Blind Side” and “The Help,” here’s a movie that purports to explore racism in America while coddling fragile white viewers at the expense of its characters of color.
Similar figures can be identified in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner and The Defiant Ones, where Sidney Poitier’s characters go to unreasonable lengths to console and save bigoted white folk, assuring the addressed (white) viewer that no matter how hateful their actions, no matter how unspeakable the history of their country’s racism, the established order will not come under threat.
The new movie “Green Book” sets up, with a pristine precision, a scenario that was already ridiculous when it was presented in “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” more than half a century ago: the acceptance by white people of a black protagonist whose talents and achievements are exceptional, whose manners are elegant, whose record is spotless, and whose résumé and connections are stamped “high-class.”
Green Book marks the flying-solo debut of director Peter Farrelly, best known for the yucky, gross-out, bro-fest comedies he made with his brother, Bobby—Dumb and Dumber, Kingpin and There’s Something About Mary.
Farrelly has long been a master of the comedic road trip (see Dumb and Dumber, Kingpin, and There’s Something About Mary), but Green Book expands human interactions beyond the bizarre and grotesque.
Now that that’s off my chest, let me tell you about a crowd-pleasing odd-couple comedy directed by Peter Farrelly, who usually works with his brother Bobby on movies such as Shallow Hal, There's Something About Mary, and Dumb and Dumber To. Green Book stars Viggo Mortensen and Mahershala Ali in a story about a trip through the American South taken by Ali’s Dr. Don Shirley, an accomplished pianist, and Mortensen's Tony Vallelunga, a Bronx-based Italian-American with racial attitudes rooted in the 1950s.
Green Book is a big and promising departure for Peter Farrelly, co-writer and co-director (with brother Bobby) of raunch-fests including Dumb and Dumber, Me, Myself & Irene and There’s Something About Mary .
But pointing out that Mortensen and Ali are solid is what’s expected; the real surprise here is director Peter Farrelly, who’s best known for comedies like Dumb and Dumber and There’s Something About Mary.
It is the first solo release from director Peter Farrelly, who previously worked with his brother Bobby on the raucous comedies Dumb and Dumber and There's Something About Mary .
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If audiences are looking for something like that, they should go stream Mississippi Burning or American History X.
“Mississippi Burning” was one of the few films to get the dread factor right, with all those Klansmen names of Stuckey, Bailey, Townley, and Swilley and kicking off the acting careers of the likes of Michael Rooker, Stephen Tobolowsky, and Pruitt Taylor Vince as exceptionally creepy racists.
He found such a man in Tony “The Lip” Vallelonga, then a bouncer at the Copacabana, later a bit player in mafia-themed touchstones like The Godfather, Goodfellas, and The Sopranos.
The real Lip was so identifiably Italian-American, he later became an actor who appeared in “The Godfather,” “Goodfellas” and “The Sopranos.”
The real-life Tony was so colorful he starred as New York mob boss Carmine Lupertazzi on The Sopranos, and also appeared in The Godfather, Goodfellas, Raging Bull, The Pope of Greenwich Village and Donnie Brasco.