Why Race Hustlers Want You to Hate Green Book.
And Why Audiences Love It
I had a big smile on my face during the first five
minutes of Green Book. Director Peter
Farrelly is famous for gross-out comedies like Dumb and Dumber. Green Book is about black-white interaction during
Jim Crow. I didn't think the fart-joke king could pull off a serious film. I
feared that any artistic merit would sink under preachy political correctness. But
Green Book is a fun movie and a
worthy work of art.
It's 1962. Frank "Tony Lip" Vallelonga,
an Italian-American living in the Bronx, is a bouncer at New York's Copacabana
nightclub. He's hired to drive Dr. Don Shirley, a black, Jamaican-American
pianist, on a concert tour of the South. Shirley needs, not just a driver, but
muscle. Frank will serve as bodyguard as well as chauffeur. The eponymous green
book is The Negro Motorist's Green Book,
an annual published by Victor Hugo Green from 1936-1966. It informed blacks about
where they could shop, eat, and spend the night. Green Book is based on real people and real events. The script was
co-written by Peter Farrelly, Brian Hayes Curie, and Nick Vallelonga, Frank's
son. Nick has said that his script is based on conversations with his father
and Shirley. Shirley knew that a film was in the works, and wanted the full story
told, but for Nick to wait until after he was dead.
Viggo Mortensen, a Danish American, is Frank. I
grew up with Italians in New Jersey, and to me it's a crime against nature for
a man whose last name ends in the Nordic suffix "sen" to play an
Italian. Again, those first minutes of the film laid my fears to rest.
Mortensen's performance is a dance. The way he fingers his lapels, bounces on
his heels, leads with his chest, thrusts forward his lower jaw, puffs out his
cheeks when pronouncing the Bs in "break my balls," all are
completely convincing. Yes, Mortensen's Tony Lip is a bit of a caricature, but
I suspect that the real life Tony Lip, back in 1962, like many Italian-American
men, was himself giving a performance.
While Mortensen's Frank is dancing a mambo, Mahershala
Ali is a ballet dancer. Dr. Shirley is an aloof, affected, snob. The exact
angle at which Ali carries his chin in relation to the earth was clearly
carefully calibrated. In one searing scene, shot in the shower of a YMCA, when
Ali finally lowers his head, you feel as if he had dropped a lead suitcase
filled with graveyard dirt.
Tony has a wife (Linda Cardellini), and Dr.
Shirley a manservant, Amit (Iqbal Theba), and an accompanist, Oleg (Dimiter D.
Marinov), but perhaps the most important supporting characters in the film are
a turquoise 1962 Cadillac Sedan DeVille, and the American road itself.
Frank is a tough guy with a heart of gold,
surrounded by a big Italian family, and low level hoods who offer him work
doing "things" that no one dare name. When two black men repair his
kitchen floor and drink lemonade his wife offers them, Frank throws out the
glasses. His wife retrieves them from the trash.
Don Shirley, notwithstanding his prodigious
musical talent, is a bit of a lost soul. All former child prodigies must
struggle to fit in; Shirley began playing piano before he was three years old.
At eighteen, he played Tchaikovsky with the Boston Pops. The real Don Shirley
lived, for fifty years, in an ornately decorated "artists' quarters"
above Carnegie Hall. There he played a Steinway beneath a crystal chandelier. Shirley
was fastidious. In 1982, he criticized jazz pianists to the New York Times. They "smoke while they're playing, and they'll put the glass
of whisky on the piano, and then they'll get mad when they're not respected
like Arthur Rubinstein. You don't see Arthur Rubinstein smoking and putting a glass
on the piano … I don't want anybody to know me well enough to slap me on the
back and say, 'Hey, baby.' The black experience through music, with a sense of
dignity, that's all I have ever tried to do." One can admire such high
standards while readily recognizing how such high standards might contribute to
a lonely life. In the film, the cinematic Shirley soothes his loneliness with a
nightly, post-performance bottle of Cutty Sark, downed in solitude.
Look – I know you know exactly how this movie
plays out. Green Book is a classic
road film, where two people who are very different are trapped together in a
small, confined space moving across a big, expansive country. They irk each
other, teach each other, fight, rely on, and come, grudgingly, to love each
other. Road movies have been playing out this plot at least since Frank Capra's
1934 It Happened One Night. Clark
Gable is the gruff newspaperman; Claudette Colbert is the snobby, sheltered
heiress. He teaches her how to hitchhike and dunk donuts; she teaches him how
to be vulnerable and talk about his dreams. Just so Frank teaches Don how to
eat fried chicken, even though it's greasy and must be eaten with the hands. Don
teaches Frank how to expose his feelings to his wife in his letters home, and
how to solve problems without punching someone in the nose. Frank and Don are a
variation on Neil Simon's Odd Couple, Oscar
Madison and Felix Unger. Opposite pairs like this have been intriguing audiences
since Apollo and Dionysus.
Though they are very dissimilar in plot, Green Book also reminds me of a
low-budget, 1963, black-and-white film, Lilies
of the Field. In that film, Sidney Poitier stars as Homer, a vagabond who
builds a chapel for Maria, (Lilia Skala,) mother superior of poor, immigrant
nuns living in remote Arizona. Homer is the Frank character here, the effusive,
carefree foil to the more uptight Mother Maria. Both films have predictable
plots composed of small incidents that, by the end, surprise you by how much
they move you.
Though Green
Book is relentlessly popular, Farrelly's artistry gives us two fully human
characters. Frank is no saint, and neither is Don. Don is a superb pianist, but
he lacks interpersonal charm. At one blacks-only motel, another lodger invites
him to a game of horseshoes. He stiffens up; he can't bring himself to kick
back and relax. Frank is a petty thief, pocketing a lucky jade stone from a
poorly guarded roadside stand in the rural South. When Don was arrested, naked,
and handcuffed in a YMCA shower for illegal contact with another man, I feared
that Frank might severe the fragile bond he and Don were forging. I was
impressed when Frank calmly said, "I've been working in nightclubs for a
long time. The world is a complicated place." When the film finished, the
audience burst into applause, a rare event. We were not alone. At the International
Movie Database, amateur reviewers repeatedly use the word "love"
when urging others to see Green Book.
Green Book, in
addition to being a virtuosic piece of popular entertainment, conveys a
timeless lesson. Again, its lesson isn't anything innovative or surprising. The
manmade barriers between members of different tribes, though appearing
permanent and formidable, collapse like the walls of Jericho given the right
trumpet blast. What unites us is more important than what separates us. With a
little humility and charity, we can overcome our differences and contribute to
each other's lives. Get two members of warring factions alone together, give
them a task to complete, and external opponents, and they will form an alliance.
Don and Frank are alone together in that Cadillac. Frank receives a bonus if he
gets Don to his concerts on time. He wants that money, and thus Jim Crow is his
enemy, as much as it is Don's.
This next part won't surprise you, either. Even as
I was relishing Green Book, I was
ticking off all the items on a list that would cause race hustlers to hate the
film. And race hustlers insist that you hate it, too.
Green Book has
an 82% positive score at Rotten Tomatoes. That's good, but reviewers often seem
to be fighting their own impulses in their reviews. A. O. Scott, writing in the
New York Times, calls Green Book "corny,"
"misguided," "sentimental," "middle-of-the-road,"
"not subtle," "crude, obvious and borderline offensive, even as
it tries to be uplifting and affirmative." At the end of his review, Scott's
reserve collapses. "There is also something about this movie … These men are
good company," Scott must acknowledge.
K. Austin Collins, an African American reviewer
writing in Vanity Fair , called the film "boneheaded,"
"sickening," and myopic." "Eating the chicken to overcome
racial friction in that teal Cadillac makes for a good story, but it severely
undercuts the politics of respectability that Shirley otherwise, and much more
interestingly, goes out of his way to embody," he writes. I'll be honest –
I don't know what this sentence means. Perhaps Collins writes this way because
he is affiliated with the English
Department at Princeton. Collins blames
white privilege. "To think, as a white filmmaker, that questions of this
sort are things you can blithely make up or change outright." The film is "historical
malpractice." The film pays attention to a working class Italian with no
claim to fame. This outrages Collins. "Dr. Shirley has a substantially
larger claim to true historical significance … Dr. Shirley was a virtuoso
recording artist … He's the guy with Robert F. Kennedy's phone number. His is
the story here that has history, writ large, to contend with – he's here
because he was exceptional … Tony Lip is the historical footnote." Collins
expresses, shamelessly, in neon lettering, the prototypical liberal's snobbism against
working class white ethnics. And Collins reveals zero awareness of his own
racism against poor whites, his own privilege as a Princeton man, his own
elitist contempt. The film's purpose, Collins insists, is for whites to be "wiped
clean of guilt."
Jourdain
Searles, an African American who contributes to "Bitch Media," accuses
Green Book of being from the "School
of Simplistic History and Sentimentality" and asks, "Why do movies
like this keep happening?" Searles calls the film "shameless," "degrading,"
"shallow," "self-important," "desperate," and "manipulative."
Searles rages, "It's a comforting vision for the white viewer, reminding
them of the 'progress' the country has made regarding racism. It also positions
them as the direct source of that progress. Yes, white people are the real
heroes for occasionally setting their privilege aside to recognize black people
as human beings. The assumption that racism can end through friendship allows
white people to be credited both with the beginning and end of the oppression
of black people in the U.S. … At least Farrelly was able to make racists
comfortable for Christmas." Note Searles' scare quotes around "progress."
No doubt Searles, in addition to being a blogger, is also a sharecropper who
cannot vote. Perhaps Searles' oddest complaint against Green Book, "Sex is never depicted."
Jenni
Miller, the white "sex editor" at Bust, confessed to succumbing
to Green Book's appeal, but assessed
herself as suffering from "Stockholm Syndrome." Miller liked the
movie, she said, because of "my own thoughtlessness, laziness and
socialization." There you have it. Miller has an internalized Committee to
Ensure Ideological Purity inside her head who accuse her of thought crimes. And
she's a sex editor at a publication called "Bust." Someone who, it
would seem, would be pro-guiltless pleasure. Green Book is evil because it makes "white people feel smug
and self-congratulatory about race relations." Even just choosing to see Green Book identifies one as a thought
criminal. "The white people who go see Green
Book think of themselves as socially open-minded people who like seeing
other white folks overcome their prejudices and become friends." When
Soviet Russians invaded Poland to usher Poles onto cattle cars to Siberia, they
made it a point to focus on stamp collectors. The Khmer Rouge focused on anyone
wearing glasses. When Miller takes over, she'll select for deportation the fans
of Green Book. Green Book is bad
because "this movie was written, directed and produced by white people."
Yes, she really said that.
At Shadow and
Act, Brooke Obie denounced Green Book
as a "white savior film." That Don saves Frank every bit as much
as Frank saves Don escaped her notice. Obie says that just because white people
associate with blacks doesn't mean that they aren't racist. After all, she
says, "Ask Sally Hemmings." Evidently Obie has not asked Sally,
because if she did she would know that Sally's last name was spelled
"Hemings." In any case, point taken. When blacks and whites interact,
every black must be understood as an enslaved person, and every white must be
understood as having the same power as the third president of the United
States. Green Book exists to
"enhance white privilege." Obie rages that Mahershala Ali sits in the
back seat of the Cadillac. In fact chauffeured passengers conventionally do sit
in backseats. Any given taxi ride demonstrates this. Obie rages that Frank
"does nothing to help end structural racism." Yes, but dear, if Frank
did that, he'd be even more of a "white savior" and you'd have to
hate this movie even more, wouldn't you?
Leon Raymond Mitchell, in the comments section,
offered an interesting theory. "Extreme HATRED of Obama and gains by
people of color gave us TRUMP. Moonlight & Black Panther gives us GREEN
BOOK." Let's break down Mitchell's claim. People hated Obama because he
was black, and so they elected Trump. Mitchell forgets that Obama got more
votes than Trump, and some voters voted for both Obama and Trump. Further, Black Panther is one of the most
financially successful superhero films ever made. In short, neither Trump's
election nor Green Book proves that
America is racist. But if an internet poster types in all caps, suddenly his
claim becomes true. And saying, "What you just said is not true and it does
not prove that America is racist" will be heard by many as a racist
statement in and of itself.
Monique Judge at The
Root declares that "This film spoon-feeds racism to white people."
Even so, she is forced to confess, "I actually enjoyed it, despite all of
its flaws. It was funny in the right places, touching in the right places."
One of the most depressing denunciations of Green Book is an echo of Princetonian K.
Austin Collins' huffing that Green Book dares
to include the story of an obscure, working class, white ethnic chauffeur in a
film about a wealthy, black concert pianist. Maurice
E. Shirley Sr., Don Shirley's brother, has actually protested that "My
brother never considered Tony to be his 'friend;' he was an employee." How
could anyone say anything so shamelessly snobbish and contemptuous? Maurice
continues, "As the only living brother of Dr. Donald W. Shirley, I,
Maurice E. Shirley, Sr. am compelled to respond … In agreement with Malcolm X
who proffered that 'every White man in America profits directly or indirectly
from his position vis-a-vis Negroes, profits from racism even though he does
not practice it or believe it.' This movie, 'The Green Book' is NOT about MY
brother, but about money, white privilege, assumption, and Tony Lip!"
Maxine C. Leftwich, another Shirley family member,
wrote,
"Our family is boycotting the film due to the implicit and the explicit
affronts we have endured while critics have hailed the film for its artistic
brilliance and its timely juxtaposition to the rise in hate crimes, White
Nationalism, and neo-Nazism in the contemporary United States."
From these objections, one can deduce a list of
requirements.
1.) Whites are essentially evil, including all white
scriptwriters, directors, and actors. No matter how benign their work may
appear on the surface, it must be interpreted in the worst way possible.
Someone makes a film starring a handsome, charismatic black actor like
Mahershala Ali playing a sympathetic lead role? Find some way to call that "sickening,"
"boneheaded" "racism."
2.) If white theater audiences applaud a film
starring a black actor, there must be something wrong with that movie. It must
be examined until its evil secrets are revealed. Or, one can simply boycott the
film in question, and fall back on quotes from Malcolm X.
3.) Whites and blacks are not to feel affection or
respect for each other. You can't see why affection and respect between blacks
and whites is racist? Keep looking till you find it. You wouldn't want to be a
thought criminal, now would you? The punishments are harsh.
Apparently not all blacks feel this way. Monique
Judge reports receiving an email from Harry Belafonte. Belafonte was a close
friend of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and an active Civil Rights campaigner. In
the email Judge posted, Belafonte wrote,
"I am compelled to drop this note to thank
the filmmakers for having made this film … I knew Don Shirley, and, in fact,
had an office across the street from his at Carnegie Hall, and I experienced
much of what he did at the same time. This movie is accurate, it is true, and
it's a wonderful movie that everyone should see. The few people who appear to
be objecting to the film's depiction of the time and the man are dead wrong,
and, if the basis of their resentment stems from it having been written and/or
directed by someone who isn't African American, I disagree with them even more
… I personally thank the filmmakers for having told this important story from a
very different lens, one no less compelling than any other."
