Green Book (2018) Review

Official trailer

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. That means a film about Don Shirley is about Tony Lip’s education. My gut reaction is split down the middle. I enjoyed the two men on screen, and I got more irritated the longer I thought about whose story the film chose to tell. The filmmaking itself is competent, and that’s about all that keeps it from sinking lower.

Mahershala Ali

Ali won Supporting Actor for what is structurally a lead role. That’s 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’s not accepted by white society, isn’t accepted by Black society, and isn’t accepted as a man, and the delivery is a person who has said it to himself many times and never to anybody else.

That rain scene is the best thing in the movie, and I wish the film had built itself around it. Ali gives Shirley more inner life in that one speech than the script allows him anywhere else.

What the film doesn’t give him is a scene where Tony isn’t observing him. Shirley has no conversation with anybody else of any length. That’s 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 exact. He gained weight, adopted a particular Bronx tone, 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 isn’t stupid, is competent, and has never once been asked to examine anything, and Mortensen plays the slow arrival of information instead of a moral awakening. The hot dog sequence establishes the whole tone. 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’s 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.

I laughed at the chicken scene, and I’m annoyed with the film for getting that laugh out of me. It’s well played and warmly shot, and it’s also the moment the movie tells you exactly whose education it cares about.

The Road Structure Works

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

The escalation is geographic. Pennsylvania is uncomfortable, Kentucky is worse, and by Alabama the venue that’s hired him won’t 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 travelers, 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’re stopped after dark, the officers explain the local rule as a matter of policy, and the film stages the encounter as an administrative procedure.

The Birmingham dining room is the sharpest of them. The manager is apologetic, explains it’s 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’s 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. That’s the film at its most precise. These stretches are where I like Green Book most. When the film lets polite managers explain policy in calm voices, it’s sharper and scarier than anything it says outright, and I’d happily have watched a version that trusted that register all the way through.

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 wasn’t estranged from his family, that he wasn’t 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’s the asymmetry that bothers me most. 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 wasn’t there to be consulted. I find that hard to get past, whatever the performances are doing.

That’s 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 wasn’t available to contest it.

Roma

Best Picture went to this. Roma won Director, Cinematography and Foreign Language Film. It’s 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 heavy part of the membership was hostile to streaming in 2019 and a vote against that film was available as a vote about distribution.

What’s worth stating is the pattern’s consistency. Driving Miss Daisy over Do the Right Thing, Crash over Brokeback Mountain, and this over Roma. Thirty years and three 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. That’s the second time he’s been in that room for one of these results. The first time was in 1990, for Driving Miss Daisy.

Should you watch Green Book?

Watch it for the two performances, and go in knowing what the film’s doing. Ali plays a constructed manner with one breach in the rain that the film spends only once, and the travel guide works as a route planner instead of a symbol. The 5 is where it falls because I admire the craft and dislike the arrangement in equal measure: the arc belongs to the driver in a movie that should have belonged to the pianist.

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