Peter Farrelly (2018)

In Green Book, which is ‘inspired by a true story’, Peter Farrelly dramatises – or ‘dramedises’ – the development of a relationship into what the film finally claims was a lifelong friendship.  Farrelly charts the experiences of the black pianist Don Shirley (Mahershala Ali) and his white chauffeur-cum-bodyguard Tony Vallelonga (Viggo Mortensen), aka Tony Lip, during a concert tour undertaken by Shirley and the two other (white) members of his trio across the American South in late 1962.  About an hour into the film, Tony asks Oleg (Dimitar Marinov), one of the other trio members, the question the audience has surely been asking from an early stage:  why has Shirley decided to perform in a region where racial segregation is still widespread?  (The title refers to The Negro Motorist Green Book, written by Victor Hugo Green, a contemporary guide for African Americans to motels and restaurants that didn’t operate a whites-only policy.)  Oleg has just said that Don could have earned three times more, as well as enjoyed a much less traumatic time, elsewhere in the US.  In response to Tony’s question, though, Oleg simply looks inscrutable and puts out his cigarette – cut to the next scene.  It’s the best part of an hour of screen time later when he tells Tony that Don chose to tour Jim Crow country because, ‘Genius isn’t enough … it takes courage to change people’s hearts’.  This may well be the inspiring message the film-makers want us to take from the movie – and a message that plenty of viewers will happily accept – but Oleg’s explanation is astonishing and incredible in relation to Don’s character as it has emerged over the intervening hour.  His motivation seems, rather, a masochistic determination to justify his sense of exceptional isolation from both white and black society.  The presumably unintended tension between his difficult personality and Green Book’s insatiable appetite for the obvious, crowd-pleasing option sometimes makes the film, as well as easily entertaining, uncomfortably compelling.

Farrelly begins unremarkably with a leisurely description of Tony Lip’s professional and family life in New York, where he works as a nightclub bouncer.  This scene-setting is overlong; the minor Italian-American personnel are standard-issue, verging on cartoonish.  The energy level starts to pick up from the point at which Tony has his job interview with Dr Donald Shirley (Tony assumes at first he’s a medical doctor).  It picks up further once they get on the road together in Don’s Cadillac.  Even so, the set-up and the direction in which Green Book is heading feel familiar.  As well as the suggestions of Driving Miss Daisy with the roles racially and socially reversed, you sense this is going to be a generic odd couple story, in which the two parties progress from prickly lack of trust to mutual respect and a greater understanding of how the other half lives.  And the film wouldn’t amount to much more than this, were it not for Don’s peculiar self-identity and the inevitable, enraging power of the racist context.  Each time the musician is on the receiving end of a racial slur or baiting, or is told by a venue where he’s playing that he can’t use a restaurant or toilet – and however obviously Farrelly stages these incidents – your blood boils.

Don Shirley lives alone in a de luxe apartment above Carnegie Hall.  The interviews for the driver appointment are held in one of its vast rooms.  Don enters in a white robe with gold braiding and ensconces himself in a golden chair – later described by Tony as a throne – that is placed on a level above the interviewee’s hot seat.  Mahershala Ali’s considerable height (6’ 2”) completes the effect of loftiness.  In Moonlight and Hidden Figures two years ago, Ali was an imposing figure.  He is here too yet the physical transformation is remarkable.  He now looks slender, almost elongated – he occasionally suggests a piece of stylised African statuary.  At first, his elegant movement and cultured voice seem overdone but Ali soon wins you over.  His bit of backseat business with a piece of fried chicken that Tony presses Don to try is the comic highlight of the film.   Ali seems to use only the very tips of his long, graceful fingers to hold the offending object – for Don this is a matter of avoiding not just grease but serious contamination.

The real Don Shirley was born in 1927 in Florida, to middle-class parents, a teacher and an Episcopal priest.  According to Wikipedia’s summary of his life, Shirley:

‘was [a] … classical and jazz pianist and composer.  He recorded many albums …during the 1950s and 1960s, experimenting with jazz with a classical influence.  He wrote organ symphonies, piano concerti, a cello concerto, three string quartets, a one-act opera, works for organ, piano and violin, a symphonic tone poem based on the novel Finnegans Wake … and a set of “Variations” on the legend of Orpheus in the Underworld.’

There’s been plenty of debate about the alleged misrepresentation of Shirley in Green Book.  Farrelly and his fellow screenwriters, Nick Vallelonga (Tony’s son) and Brian Hayes Currie, certainly oversimplify his musical pedigree – how they do so illustrates the film’s calculated approach more generally.  In early scenes in the car, Tony plays tracks by Little Richard and Aretha Franklin, of whom Don has hardly heard.  He later tells Tony of his deep frustration with the commercial imperatives that drive his record company (Cadence) to package him as a classy but not a classical performer – that’s how the white people who buy his records and tickets for his concerts (‘to make themselves feel more cultured’) insist on seeing a black pianist.  Farrelly et al aren’t afraid of briefly contradicting themselves for the sake of an easy laugh – as when Tony tells Don that, after he got the driving job, his wife bought one of Shirley’s records:

Tony:    Yeah.  Cover had a bunch of kids sittin’ around a campfire? …

Don:     Orpheus in the Underworld.  It’s based on a French opera.  And those weren’t children on the cover, those were demons in the bowels of Hell.

Tony:    No shit!  They must’ve been naughty kids!

For the most part, though, the musical cues are designed to show Don as cut off from black culture and traditions yet creatively constrained by white prejudice and stereotyping – thus preparing the ground for a key sequence late in the story.  The last stop on the two-month tour is a country club in Birmingham, Alabama.  Denied entry to the club’s whites-only dining room, Don refuses to play.  He and Tony go instead to a blues joint with an African-American clientele, where Don plays two numbers impromptu.  The first displays his classical technique; the second is honky-tonk boogie-woogie. The pieces demonstrate, respectively, (a) to the surprised black clubbers what a person of colour is musically capable of and (b) that Don has sort of got in touch with his roots.   Just about the only credible thing about this excruciatingly phony scene is that Don, already in evening dress for the country club recital that doesn’t happen, keeps his bow tie on for the boogie-woogie number.  It’s a pity the experience is so epiphanic that, when we see him and Tony leaving the club later that night, the white tie has disappeared.

In an earlier, similarly crude sequence, the Cadillac breaks down on a country road; while Tony is fixing the car, his passenger gazes at black sharecroppers in a nearby field and they stare back at him blankly.  The chasm between the affluent, cultured Don and ‘ordinary’ African-American experience feels increasingly artificial.   This is a man who, in reality (and as he tells Tony in the film), had a degree in psychology as well as in music and whose Wikipedia entry includes the following:

‘Discouraged by the lack of opportunities for classical black musicians, Shirley abandoned the piano as a career while young.  He studied psychology at the University of Chicago and began work in Chicago as a psychologist.  There he returned to music.  He was given a grant to study the relationship between music and juvenile crime …’

This makes it all the harder to understand why Don keeps a snobbish distance from other African Americans to the extent that he does in Green Book.  His anxious, drowning-his-sorrows solitude is more persuasively explained by the revelation of gay proclivities:  he’s apprehended with another (white) man at a YMCA swimming pool, where Tony successfully bribes the police officers concerned to prevent an arrest proceeding.  Don is angry that the police have in effect been ‘rewarded’ for their efforts though it’s left vague as to whether he objects to their racism or their homophobia.  The latter seems technically irrelevant – the officers are presumably applying the law as it stood in 1962 – but the vagueness on Peter Farrelly’s part is no doubt intentional.  He wants to keep showing Don both as a victim and as a man with a problem ripe for solving in traditional Hollywood style.

The script’s depiction of Don is contrived but it does create a dramatic arc to the character, of which Mahershala Ali takes full advantage.  Viggo Mortensen doesn’t have the same opportunities.  Tony, of course, has his eyes opened by what happens on the concert tour but he doesn’t reveal initially unsuspected depths.  Although Mortensen registers his reactions with expressive economy, he’s stuck illustrating Tony’s emphatic lack of refinement throughout.  Happily married, he writes regular letters to his wife Dolores (Linda Cardellini, in a nice, inevitably limited performance) back in the Bronx.   Don starts helping Tony make the letters more romantic as well as more literate.  These bits of the story – mildly amusing, rather more patronising – stick out as material the writers have worked up to obscure the fact that Mortensen’s role is increasingly secondary.  (Throughout the current awards season, he has featured in the lead actor and Mahershala Ali in the supporting actor category.  It would have made as much, if not more, sense to reverse the arrangement.)  It’s a little puzzling, given its title, that the film doesn’t give more prominence to the selection of places to stay etc – something that might at least have given Tony a more evident hand in planning, or trying to plan, the itinerary.

Mortensen does well, even so.  The forty-plus pounds he put on to play Tony (and, it’s good to see, appears to have taken off again since) make you more conscious that he’s doing a turn but it’s an accomplished and likeable turn, with Italian-American gestures and vocal inflections that seem fully absorbed and natural.  When a photo of the real Tony appeared on the screen at the end, I felt relief that the role had been cast against physical type.   The combination of the stereotyped writing of the part and a Tony Vallelonga lookalike would have been harder to stomach.  On which subject:  it seems fair reward for greatly expanding his waistline that Mortensen too is reliably funny when Tony Lip is eating, as he often is.

Apologies from the four main men in front of and behind the camera have been coming thick and fast in recent months, as Green Book has continued to make money and win prizes.  Peter Farrelly once had a habit of flashing his genitals on set, as a joke.  He now regrets the exposure (probably in two senses of the word).  Nick Vallelonga is contrite about a tweet he posted endorsing @realDonaldTrump’s claim that Muslims in Jersey City cheered on 9/11 when the Twin Towers went down.  Vallelonga, who sounds like a man with an eye to the main chance, ‘especially deeply apologize[s] to the incredibly brilliant and kind Mahershala Ali and all members of the Muslim faith for the hurt I have caused’.  Ali himself is apologetic too, in response to claims by the Shirley family that Green Book travesties the true relationship between the two principals.  The actor wrote to Don Shirley’s nephew that ‘I did the best I could with the material I had’ and wasn’t aware there were ‘close relatives with whom I could have consulted to add some nuance to the character’.  Since Don Shirley died as recently as 2013 (just a few weeks after Tony Vallelonga), it seems surprising that Ali didn’t trouble to ask sooner if such relatives existed.  At a promotional event shortly before Green Book opened in North America, Viggo Mortensen used the ‘N’ word – all six letters – so he also has had to say sorry.

While the film is essentially manipulative and opportunistic, I’m not sure some of the factual inaccuracies that have generated objections are a major problem.  The fact that, for example, the road trip was much longer than two months seems unimportant.  The question of what happened between Don and Tony after the trip matters more but the closing text on screen doesn’t detail the nature of their alleged ‘friendship’ and that word is open to very different interpretations.  The Shirley family insist the relationship was purely that of employer-employee; perhaps Don and Tony never had any further contact.  But if they did, and even if that consisted of no more than, say, annual exchange of Christmas cards, it doesn’t seem a gross misrepresentation to describe them as friends.  Even so, this is another instance of a biographical film that causes you to ask why, if the people behind it were keen to depart from the facts, they didn’t change the names of the characters.  Don Shirley may have been well known half a century ago but he was hardly Nat King Cole (mentioned in the film as a contemporary who experienced some of the same difficulties that Shirley did).  Perhaps the names are unchanged largely because Nick Vallelonga was determined to commemorate his father.

The most striking of the four controversies outlined above is the one involving Viggo Mortensen.  He had prefaced the offending remark with ‘I don’t like saying this word’ and was making the point that its largely discontinued use was a good thing.  He wasn’t applying the term but making a reasonable remark about its former application.  Yet his saying ‘nigger’ rather than ‘the N-word’ was considered no less reprehensible than voicing the word abusively.  Perhaps the sentence I’ve just written is open to the same criticism.   It’s this kind of reaction that gives political correctness – that is, an obtusely narrow interpretation of political correctness – a bad name.

After the night in Birmingham, Don and Tony decide to try to make it back home in time for Christmas Eve.  It’s a long journey in challenging weather and a nice touch that, for the last few miles, Tony is so dog tired that Don takes over the driving.   Back in New York, Tony returns to a boisterous family celebration.  He invites Don to join him but Don declines.  He returns to the opulent loneliness of his pied-à-terre, where he tells his quiet, conscientious valet (Iqbal Theba) to go home and enjoy the holiday with his family.  Tony, though glad to be back with Dolores and their kids, is unusually pensive.  Then, in true rom-com style, Don turns up at the front door.  Tony delightedly welcomes him in and introduces him to Dolores, who has the last line of the script:  she quietly thanks Don for the letters.  You get the distinct impression from this finale that Peter Farrelly et al have planned not just a box-office hit but a Christmas television perennial for the future.  By the end of the film, you feel a bit like Don Shirley, trying but failing to avoid that piece of KFC.  You can take a dim view of Green Book but also see why people find it tasty.

14 February 2019