Green Book (2018)

Rating: 3/10 (20 August 2019)

Directed by Peter Farrelly. Starring Viggo Mortensen, Mahershala Ali, Linda Cardinelli, Joe Cortese, Dimiter D. Marinov, Sebastian Maniscalco, Tom Virtue, Brian Stepanek, Iqbal Theba, P.J. Byrne, Maggie Nixon. (PG-13)
Tony "Lip" Vallelonga (Mortensen), loving husband and father, wise-guy-adjacent tough guy, and casual racist, is selected to drive acclaimed black pianist Don Shirley (Ali) on an eight-week road trip through the Deep South; no need for the audience to bring the rose-colored shades since all cameras used to shoot this picture apparently had that filter on preset. Old-fashioned to the point of insult, the majority of the running time is spent in the company of both men, who "learn" from each other and "bond" as a result (at least they both know how to eat fried chicken by the end), although their camaraderie rarely exceeds the level of a second-rate buddy movie. It's a trial to watch good actors like Mortensen and Ali try to breathe life into one of the hokiest and most obvious screenplays for a major motion picture in several years; granted, it doesn't help that Mortensen chooses to play it too broad (the crass Italian-American stereotyping feels pulled less from reality than from sketch comedy). Ali fares a little better, but his tightly-wound but injured stoicism does not profit from the producers' decision to rarely let Shirley be onscreen without Vallelonga, depriving us of critical reactions and emotions that aren't surface-deep and observed through another character's eyes. (There's even a brief episode where it's revealed that Shirley is gay, but Vallelonga barely seems interested and the movie never brings it up again.) Focusing almost entirely on the white character wouldn't have been so problematic if Vallelonga actually showed growth and regret and changed for the better, but he's pretty much the same person he was at the beginning, just willing to accept this specific black man as slightly-more-friend-than-employer. Designed and packaged as crowd-pleasing fare, and the con seemed to work when it nabbed a Best Picture Oscar, but this is little more than a clumsy reversal of "Driving Miss Daisy," another inexplicable populist victor that feels a little embarrassing in retrospect.
32/100