I never fully understood America’s race problems until I watched Green Book (2018).
I should have watched Green Book sooner. I knew in my gut it would be a great film because I put money on it (and won) when it came to betting for Academy Award for Best Picture.
Yes, not only does director Peter Farrelly, one of the brother’s behind my favourite comedies Dumb and Dumber, Shallow Hal, and Me, Myself & Irene (talk about a directorial pivot!) fully deserve that award for Green Book, but Mahershala Ali’s incredibly compelling, elegantly acted, lovingly performed with nuance, life, and sympathy, jazz pianist Don Shirley and Viggo Mortensen’s electrifying method-role-of-a-lifetime bodyguard “Tony Lip” Vallelonga both deserve awards and recognition too.
Green Book (2018) – Film Review
This buddy-story about two men lovingly finding their shared humanity tells the real-life tale of a classical and jazz prodigy touring the racist Deep South in 1960s.
This story of segregated America made me laugh, cry, and think deeply about issues of race, identity, human compassion and connection.
“You only win when you maintain your dignity,” Don Shirley tells Tony Lip, both men locked in a Deep South jail cell, after he assaults a white policer for calling him ‘half a nigger’ on account of his Italian identity.
That is one of the most powerful lessons from Green Book.
A lesson for the ages.
And a lesson for the times today.
Chills ran up my entire body during that scene.
Don tells Tony that he couldn’t compose himself in that one moment, just that one moment, and reacted to being called that word. How would he survive an entire lifetime like that?
The star of the jazz show being banned from the dining room but expected to perform for white patrons. That same star being told he had to use a dirty outhouse in the rain-drenched garden rather than share the same bathroom with “genteel” white folk. Being beaten to a pulp in a bar on account of his skin colour. Prejudiced against not only for the colour of his skin but his sexual proclivity.
I may have got chills when Don teaches dignity, as I could help but think of oppressed Jewish Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl’s “dignity in suffering” as being the key to meaning, but I really got chills, and was forced to fight back the tears, when Don breaks down in the rain:
So if I’m not *black* enough and if I’m not *white* enough, and I’m not *man* enough, then tell me, Tony, what am I?
This is the race narrative America, and the rest of the world, needs.
We don’t need the victim narratives like Joker where the only “lesson”, if you can call it that, if the world’s unfair you should burn it down.
In the the worryingly not-so-distanced racially segregated past of the US, Don Shirley is a real victim. But he never allows himself to be a victim. He refuses.
We ache alongside him, and feel his growing anxiety as to his “real” identity all throughout the film right up to the powerful cymbal clash crescendo in the rain.
Tony Lip is astounded when he discovers that Don has never eaten fried chicken nor does he know the music of Aretha Franklin.
“They’re your people, Doc,” he says.
Don explains that not all black people have to enjoy the same kinds of food and music.
Later we feel the trauma of Don’s feelings of rejection when he admonishes Tony for gambling in the dirt with the black workers of this huge white country estate.
He says something to the effect of how Tony has a choice and must exercise his choice to keep himself elevated.
In that moment, we feel the sting of Don rejecting those who reject him, we feel the pain of being born into a world where oppression is the norm and something one cannot choose, but we also feel Don’s prejudice.
Expertly crafted, easily overlooked, it’s in that moment that we realise how intertwined are the issues of race and class.
And whilst Tony learns a lot from Don, the jazz prodigy has something to learn from Tony too.
“The world’s full of lonely people,” he says. “Scared to make the first move.”
That mindset, coupled with Don’s philosophy of always keeping one’s dignity, is a powerful antidote to the injustice of life.