Review: Green Book

The year is 1962, and New York nightclub bouncer Frank Vallelonga (Viggo Mortensen) needs a job. The rough-edged Italian-American is as far from the smooth and urbane classical African-American musician Don Shirley (Mahershala Ali) as you can get, but if Don is going to survive a tour of the deeply racist Deep South he’s going to need a driver who can throw his weight around. You don't need a road map to see where this is going.

This is a film best described as "well-meaning", though just how much slack good intentions gets you these days is up for debate. It's been raking in awards nominations all over the place (and just grabbed a swag of Oscar noms), but if you really want to get outraged that a "quality" film is being put up for awards that tend to go towards "quality" films there are probably worse films around if you want to look for them.

Here director Peter Farrelly (who co-wrote the script with Vallelonga’s son) doesn’t shirk from the ingrained prejudices of the Jim Crow-era South, and both Mortensen and (especially) Ali give nuanced and often moving performances. But this takes a firmly old-Hollywood view of race relations, telling a story (firmly disputed by Shirley’s relatives) where both men equally suffer from superficial prejudices - ones they easily shrug off to embrace their shared humanity while traveling through a region ruled by blatant, institutionalised racism. 

The result is a film where racism is overcome by personal growth and understanding, but the characters are constantly surrounded by deeply racist impersonal institutions that have no interest in understanding the people that are harmed by their bigotry. It's a feel good film where the reason to feel good has nothing to do with what we're seeing on the screen - you could tell roughly the same story set a hundred years earlier, only then the realisation that all this blatant racism would outlive the cast of characters no matter how much they personally learn and grow as people might upset awards voters.

Still, taken purely on the level of a buddy film this largely acquits itself well, delivering the required emotional high points and comedy chuckles in a professional manner. But even on this most basic of levels, this can't help but come across as occasionally tone-deaf: one of the supposedly humorous bonding moments occurs when Vallelonga teaches Shirley how to eat fried chicken. 

- Anthony Morris