Green Book
Directed by: Peter Farrelly
Written by: Nick Vallelonga & Brian Hayes Currie and Peter Farrelly
Starring: Viggo Mortensen, Mahershala Ali, Linda Cardellini, Sebastian Maniscalco, Jenna Laurenzo, Dimiter D. Marinov, Mike Hatton, Iqbal Theba, Craig DiFrancia
Biography/Comedy/Drama - 130 min Reviewed by Charlie Juhl on 13 Nov 2018
Written by: Nick Vallelonga & Brian Hayes Currie and Peter Farrelly
Starring: Viggo Mortensen, Mahershala Ali, Linda Cardellini, Sebastian Maniscalco, Jenna Laurenzo, Dimiter D. Marinov, Mike Hatton, Iqbal Theba, Craig DiFrancia
Biography/Comedy/Drama - 130 min Reviewed by Charlie Juhl on 13 Nov 2018
You can hear the clamor even before the end credits are done rolling - the exclamatory bellows are beginning for Oscar attention. It happens annually to the film which is the most crowd pleasing but contains enough Oscar-bait that folks are sure this is going to be the one. “La La Land is it!” “Three Billboards shakes you to the core, it’s a sure-fire winner!” “It took years of perseverance to make Boyhood, the guts to pull off such a feat must be rewarded!” By the way, none of these films won Best Picture. Green Book is the 2018 addition to this list. It will be nominated throughout awards season and even pick up a statue here and there; however, it is not going to win Best Picture. La La Land took us over the moon, but Moonlight had something to say. We had never seen anything like Boyhood, but Birdman was a puzzle we couldn’t stop picking at. Green Book is a light-hearted, odd couple, road trip movie with a few scenes displaying nauseating Deep South racism. You’ll have a marvelous time in the movie theater, but the gut punch, that feeling you’ve just seen something you’ve never seen before, is missing.
Tony “Lip” Vallelonga (Viggo Mortensen, Captain Fantastic) is a Mr. Fix-It at the Copacabana night club in 1962 New York City. This a big band joint, the kind of place local mobsters can take their wife and their mistress to. Therefore, it’s the kind of place that needs a guy like Tony to personally welcome the more select clientele, ensure everybody’s happy, and smash in a guy’s face when he steps outta line. When did these big band joints disappear by the way? Was it TV that did them in or Studio 54? After a night of tips and back slaps, Tony crawls into bed with his wife, Dolores (Linda Cardellini, A Simple Favor), in their small Bronx apartment, part of a strong Italian-American neighborhood full of close family and friends ready to yell at the Yankees on TV or kick off an impromptu feast. If it wasn’t for the fact that Tony’s son in real life, Nick Vallelonga, had the idea for and co-wrote the screenplay, I would say there are some hardcore Italian-American stereotypes displayed here. However, Nick assure us everybody was that loud, in each other’s business, and talked like the wise guys James Gandolfini was imitating in The Sopranos.
Tony “Lip” Vallelonga (Viggo Mortensen, Captain Fantastic) is a Mr. Fix-It at the Copacabana night club in 1962 New York City. This a big band joint, the kind of place local mobsters can take their wife and their mistress to. Therefore, it’s the kind of place that needs a guy like Tony to personally welcome the more select clientele, ensure everybody’s happy, and smash in a guy’s face when he steps outta line. When did these big band joints disappear by the way? Was it TV that did them in or Studio 54? After a night of tips and back slaps, Tony crawls into bed with his wife, Dolores (Linda Cardellini, A Simple Favor), in their small Bronx apartment, part of a strong Italian-American neighborhood full of close family and friends ready to yell at the Yankees on TV or kick off an impromptu feast. If it wasn’t for the fact that Tony’s son in real life, Nick Vallelonga, had the idea for and co-wrote the screenplay, I would say there are some hardcore Italian-American stereotypes displayed here. However, Nick assure us everybody was that loud, in each other’s business, and talked like the wise guys James Gandolfini was imitating in The Sopranos.
Tony Lip is a worker bee squeaking by. He’s shrewd enough to wring a few more bucks out of the club’s big spenders but wise enough not to sign on as a full-time organized crime flunky. He’s also just as racist as his peers; he calls African-Americans “eggplants” and throws two glasses in the garbage can after Dolores offers some black handymen some lemonade. Tony is both an everyman and an odd duck. When Dr. Don Shirley (Mahershala Ali), a world-class pianist who lives above Carnegie Hall, makes inquiries for a certain kind of man, Tony’s name comes up more than once. He’s discreet and imposing. He’s the kind of guy who will pocket the pen from the job interview and then walk down the block and challenge the local glutton to a hot dog eating contest to help cover this month’s rent. Tony is the guy you want to shepherd the oddest duck of them all - an elite, effeminate African-American piano player on a tour of the parts of America ignorant enough to despise him.
So much of Green Book takes place in the car with the cultured black man in the back being chauffeured by the gruff white man in the front, it all but screams reverse Driving Miss Daisy. Before these two opposites even drive a mile out of Manhattan, the audience knows they are going to illuminate and refine each other’s respective blind spots - it’s what odd couples do. Dr. Shirley confronts and challenges Tony’s lax morality. Tony is a very low-level sneak thief, litter bug, and grammatical child. Dr. Shirley is an out of touch snob who cannot appreciate the superiority of Kentucky Fried Chicken because he won’t move past the stereotype that “his people” love fried chicken and the issue that he won’t use his bare hands to eat food. When the duo really gets going, Tony lobs the grenade, “You don’t know shit about your own people!” But Dr. Shirley has no people. Folks his own skin color do not identify with him and folks of the other skin color don’t even recognize him as a person.
Walking out of the theater, I overheard someone say, “Tony” and “white hero” - think Sandra Bullock in The Blind Side and Emma Stone in The Help. This is a valid question to pose. Are Nick Vallelonga and director Peter Farrelly setting up Tony as a white savior, a character only there to propel the endangered black man because he cannot do it himself? I do not believe so. Tony takes as much from Dr. Shirley as he offers. Sure, Tony provides muscle and physical security, but Dr. Shirley saves him an equal number of times, just not in ways which require brute strength. What some may deride as a white savior is actually practical planning for the 1962 reality. Tony is not a hero who swoops in to save the day; he is exactly the man you want giving the stink eye to those who would harm the genius hands of one of the world’s premiere musical artists.
Many will assume, based on the time and geography, that Green Book will be more dramatic than it is. No doubt there are plenty of serious moments designed to make us tense, but I would label Green Book first and foremost a buddy comedy. You will remember the laughs more than the brow furrows, which is why Green Book is such a crowd pleaser - audiences clamor for serious, but light-hearted material. Peter Farrelly, known as a raunch comedy provider famous for Dumb and Dumber, There’s Something About Mary, and Stuck on You, isn’t shoving the drama aside in favor of his trademark guffaws; however, he is able to weave together the chuckles with the squints. Like most others who champion Green Book, he latched on to a remarkable story he knew would be a foundation for a hell of a movie. People want to connect themselves with quality and Green Book scratches that itch, both on the creative and the audience sides.
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