This blog entry title is corny, I know, and the eponymous song yucky, but inexorably appropriate for Green Book.
Green Book is the 3rd feature film directed by Peter Farrelly, not counting the dozen or so efforts he co-directed with his brother Bobby, starting in the mid-90s, mostly sex comedies which brought elasticity to the borders of taste in the genre, the apex of which arguably remaining the incognizant use of sperm as hair styling gel by Cameron Diaz in There's Something About Mary (1998).
Green Book is different. It tells the half-true story of black jazz pianist Don Shirley (Mahershala Ali, excellent) who goes on a tour of the Deep South in 1962, four years before segregationism was abolished on paper, and recruits for the purpose as driver, personal assistant and general fixer Tony Vallelonga (Viggo Mortensen, unsurpassed), an Italian-American bouncer with a deserved reputation for quick and decisive reactions in difficult situations. In case you don’t know by now, the book of the title refers to a travel guide issued from the 1930s till the 1960s for African-Americans who drove through the US Southeast, listing hotels, restaurants and even gas stations which catered for “colored” people.
The film's dramatic device is obvious, and it is therefore so much more noteworthy it pulls it off so seamlessly and poignantly: a white man driving a black man through early 1960s segregated South and the interesting situations that could, and did, arise, form both sides of what was then referred to, and sometimes even today, as the “racial divide”. A supplemental, and slightly less obvious, paradox, emerges as Don, besides being a virtuoso piano soloist, has a doctorate in Music, Psychology, and Liturgical Arts, and is considerably more educated than the lunpen greaseball Tony, who, besides resourceful, is perceptive enough to reply to Don, in one of the car dialogues scenes that constitute the film's backbone: “I'm more black than you!”.
After, or maybe even before, Green Book's considerable entertainment value, what impressed me about the film the most was how it reminds us of just how horrible things were a relatively short time ago without allowing us to forget that, although much better, they are still, from Brazil to the Philippines, pretty horrible now. Long way gone, long way to go.