Most of what you could ever want in a film

Rating: 10/10 (16 February 2019)

When Viggo Mortensen in the role of heavy-set hustler Tony Vallelonga acts as driver and minder for highly-gifted if somewhat effete pianist Dr Don Shirley (here played to a tee by the ever-dependable but ever-better Mahershala Ali), the gorgeous, gigantic blue Cadillac with its radio and all still manages to overheat once and get a flat one other time, and its wipers don't work too well. Likewise, the gorgeous American landscape in this "road movie" set in 1962 is tilled by black farmworkers not looking a whole lot different from their slave ancestors a century before. And then there is the titular "Green Book" (of clubs, hotels, garages, barbers' shops, beauty parlours, etc.) that in its oh-so-tasteful and user-friendly way provides handy hints to Americans of colour - needless to say the (real-life) book calls them "N**ro Motorists" - how to get the most of their tourism in the southern states ... without there being any tensions.
Just three of the ways (there are many more) in which Peter Farrelly's "Green Book" follows what are almost companion movies like "Hidden Figures" and "The Butler" (or indeed even "The Shape of Water") in exploring that now-exotic world of an all-powerful 1960s America with its ostensibly slick, wealthy, consumer-friendly lifestyle hosting within it a tumour of nastiness that is as malign (and HUGE) as it is absurd.
Don Shirley is inded gifted, and applauded wherever he goes, yet he has to use a different toilet and stay in different motels (just as the "computers" in "Hidden Figures" were trusted with sustaining America's cutting edge space-effort for NASA, while also having to use a separate kettle from their white - and at times professionally inferior - colleagues).
So there is anger and disdain for that world in this film, even as its beauty and elegance are put on full show. But - wonderfully - it is neither in-your-face or overdone; but is rather evinced (mostly) far more effectively in mini-scenes and dialogues more or less erudite and often warm and witty between the two key characters.
How on Earth anyone could have foreseen the slim, bright-eyed Mortensen being made over into a somewhat overweight, and not-too-bright (though at times canny) middle-aged Italian-American is beyond me. This is the antithesis of Aragorn (or indeed of John Halder in the great play-turned film "Good").
But it's just SUPERB anyway...
Of course, this story is interesting (and portrayed spellbindingly) in part because Tony is less wealthy, less clever, less pretty-much-everything than Don, but because the latter keeps being brought low by the world around him (and occasionally by his own pretty-understandable lapses of various kinds), the characters equalise ... and hit it off better and better in an amazing way that history records as a true event. (At this point, care might be taken, as I know already that some criticise the presentation of this story for being not as true-to-life as it might be. Fair comment, but this film is a wonderful work of art anyway).
At one point, the above effect is made clear in a heated "race to the bottom" dialogue between the two that Shirley wins with a statement to the effect that he is not black enough or white enough or man enough to be anybody at all...
It's as somehow beautiful as it is devasating and heartfelt.
Given that this is also (almost too good to be true in being) a "driving home for Christmas" story, there is a slightly implausible but also wonderful ending that speaks volumes in its mini-attempt at Jewish-Italian-Black reconciliation, but the sour aftertaste (the same one as with "Hidden Figures") is the real-life awareness that reconciliatory steps of this kind were too few and far between, and have perhaps continued to be so.
Yet the overall effect of the film remains a warm one, if one of undulled core message, and that is a great trick for Farrelly and the two remarkably good key actors to pull off. All credit to them.