Green Book (2018) Review

A Copacabana bouncer is out of work for two months while the club is refurbished. A pianist living above Carnegie Hall needs a driver for eight weeks in the South. The bouncer takes the job because he needs the money and is told to expect trouble.

The 5 is the average of the performances and the structure. Ali and Mortensen are both very good, the film is professionally made, and the arc belongs to the driver, which means a film about Don Shirley is about Tony Lip’s education.

It is also the fourth instance on this page of the Academy preferring that arrangement, which is why it appears here instead of because it is a bad film.

Mahershala Ali

Ali won Supporting Actor for what is structurally a lead role, which is the category placement the film’s own arrangement produced.

The performance is the best thing in the picture and the most precise. Shirley is formal, is isolated by choice and by circumstance, drinks alone, and has constructed an entire manner as protection, and Ali plays the construction instead of the man underneath it.

The throne is the film’s best single image of that. He receives Tony in a room above Carnegie Hall seated on a carved chair in ceremonial dress, and the absurdity is entirely deliberate on the character’s part instead of the film’s.

The best scene is in the rain. Shirley states that he is not accepted by white society, is not accepted by Black society, and is not accepted as a man, and the delivery is a person who has said it to himself many times and never to anybody else.

What the film does not give him is a scene where he is not being observed by Tony. Shirley has no conversation with anybody else of any length, which is the same structural fault the previous three entries on this page have.

The trio is also almost absent. Shirley tours with a cellist and a bassist who are with him for eight weeks, and the film gives them perhaps six lines between them and no relationship with him at all.

Mortensen

Tony Lip is written as a broad character and Mortensen plays him more precisely than the writing requires.

The physical work is specific. He gained weight, adopted a particular Bronx register, eats continuously and audibly, and the performance is built around a man whose appetites are how he engages with the world.

What he does well is the incuriosity. Tony is not stupid, is competent, and simply has never been asked to think about anything, and Mortensen plays the slow arrival of information instead of a moral awakening.

The hot dog sequence establishes the whole register. He wins a bet by eating twenty-six of them, is proud of it, and the film uses a competitive eating contest to explain a man’s entire relationship with the world.

The letter-writing scenes are the film’s most enjoyable material and its most conventional. Shirley dictates, Tony improves, and the device is charming and is the clearest example of what the film is doing, since the Black character’s function is to make the white character better at something.

The fried chicken sequence is the other one and it has been the most criticized. Tony teaches Shirley to eat it with his hands, the film plays it as a warm scene, and the arrangement of who is teaching whom about what is the film’s whole problem in ninety seconds.

The Road Structure Works

The film’s mechanics are sound and this is the half of it that is not in dispute.

The escalation is geographic. Pennsylvania is uncomfortable, Kentucky is worse, and by Alabama the venue that has hired him will not let him eat in its dining room, and the film uses distance traveled as a measure of danger.

The Green Book itself is used properly. A published guide to which establishments would accept Black travellers, referred to practically, and the film’s best small detail is Tony using it as a route planning document and not as a symbol.

The guide was real and ran from 1936 to 1966, published by a Harlem postal worker named Victor Hugo Green, and the film’s decision to name itself after the document instead of after either man is the most defensible choice it makes.

The sundown town sequence is the strongest thing outside the performances. They are stopped after dark, the officers explain the local rule as a matter of policy, and the film stages the whole thing as an administrative procedure.

The Birmingham dining room is the sharpest of them. The manager is apologetic, explains it is simply the policy of the establishment, and offers to have food brought to a storeroom, and nobody in the scene raises their voice.

The tailor shop is the other one. He is measured for a suit, is refused permission to try it on, and the manager explains the store’s policy while continuing to take the measurements, which is the film at its most precise.

What the Family Said

Don Shirley’s surviving relatives objected to the film publicly and in detail, and the objection is part of the record.

Their stated complaints were specific. That Shirley was not estranged from his family, that he was not isolated from Black culture or the civil rights movement, that he knew the Kennedys and Martin Luther King, and that Tony Lip was an employee instead of a friend. Maurice Shirley described the friendship as a symphony of lies.

Shirley also held doctorates, had performed with orchestras, and had a recording career that the film touches only lightly, and the family’s objection was partly that a serious musician had been reduced to a passenger.

The film’s screenplay was co-written by Nick Vallelonga, Tony Lip’s son, from his father’s account, and Shirley had reportedly asked that no film be made during his lifetime. He died in 2013.

That is the specific asymmetry and it is worth stating plainly. One man told his son a story about a trip he took fifty years earlier, and the other man had asked for no film and was not there to be consulted.

That is the mechanism and it explains the result. A film built from one participant’s recollection, written by his son, will tell that participant’s version, and the other participant was not available to contest it.

Roma

Best Picture went to this. Roma won Director, Cinematography and Foreign Language Film, which is the same split pattern this page documents repeatedly.

This film also won Original Screenplay and Supporting Actor, which is three awards to Roma’s three, and the difference between the two sets is entirely which one included Best Picture.

The comparison is on this site and the two films are almost a controlled experiment. Roma is about a domestic worker told entirely from her position, and this is about a Black musician told from his driver’s position, and the Academy chose the second.

The Netflix factor is also real and is discussed in the Roma review. A substantial part of the membership was hostile to streaming in 2019 and a vote against that film was available as a vote about distribution.

What is worth stating is the pattern’s consistency. Driving Miss Daisy over Do the Right Thing, Crash over Brokeback Mountain, The Blind Side over Precious, and this over Roma. Thirty years and four instances of the same preference.

Spike Lee also walked toward the exit when it was announced and said afterward that the ref made a bad call, which is the second time he has been in that room for one of these results. The first time was in 1990, for Driving Miss Daisy.

Should you watch Green Book?

For the two performances. Mahershala Ali playing a constructed manner instead of the man behind it, one breach in the rain that the film spends only once, a travel guide used as a route planner instead of a symbol, and an arc that belongs to the driver.

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