A great film

Rating: 8/10 (25 January 2019)

It is possible to analyze "Green Book" from some points of view. It's a film about racism. But it's also a road movie that talks about an unimaginable friendship. It is also a film that shakes the prejudice of deep America, especially the South of the United States. It is still a film about a character who is not in any environment because he is in the rare position of the privileged black and feels a deep loneliness for it. None of this is original. None of this is something that other movies have not talked about in movie history. But how delightful, bothersome and interesting is to follow the journey of pianist Don Shirley (a brilliant Mahershala Ali) and his driver and captain Tony Vallelonga (equally wonderful).
Particularly, "Green Book" has more interesting in two of the points above. The first is such an improbable relationship between Tony, this brassy, simple-minded Italian who sees the world so bluntly and directly, separating people into tribes with their own ingrained and unmixed customs, and Shirley, a black man of erudite education, who lives as an isolated king at the top of Carnegie Hall. And it's amazing that even in such ignorance he made Shirley see how far he was from himself.
The story of Peter Farrelly's film is real. In fact in the 1960s, Shirley was a very popular pianist who decided to tour the most racist chants in America. Your objective is touching people's hearts.
But how difficult it is to break historic and archaic barriers. Shirley has to go through some ridiculous situations. At night, he is a brilliant pianist applauded by all white and wealthy audiences. But during the day it's just another black man who can not eat at the same restaurant in his audience or use the same bathroom.
As much as the film does not portray the hell it was to be a black man in that region, and its name comes from a survival guide there, it's still cruel, almost disgusting to anyone who sees everything that Shirley has to go through to keep the idea of your tour alive. It is important, however, as the character himself states, "maintain dignity". Only by dignity is overcome the rabid prejudice.
But "Green Book" is not only about the pure denunciation of racism in a region of America. It is in the hassle and distance that Shirley himself feels among his peers that the film exposes his signs of greatness. It is by showing that he is not black enough to be among his own, neither white nor man enough to occupy other groups, that "Green Book" exposes the terrible loneliness of a man who finds himself in the middle of the path of a triangle over which he does not have the skills, or the supposed qualities, necessary to occupy no vertex.
In a fragmented society that needs labels Shirley is never to be found. It connects to nothing and feels isolated in all environments. His most faithful companion is a carafe of expensive alcohol, which keeps him away from everyone and plunged even more into solitude.
Who are your peers? It is not whites who hate him when he is off the stage and deny him the right to experience a suit in a shop. It is not the black people, with whom he does not connect precisely because he does not share the same rich but different culture from his classical piano education, and by wearing expensive, well-cut suits.
For him, approaching both sides requires an instrument of conciliation for music. Hence his tour trying to repeat something similar that Nat King Cole tried a decade earlier. Its purpose is to touch the hearts of the people and to approach the vertices so far apart appealing to the sense of humanity. To perhaps feel less alone. But also help change the society.
The work, however, is slow and gradual. And in the great friendship that Shirley builds with Tony, a man who shows himself to be racist at the beginning of the film, but whose friendship and partnership with Shirley grows throughout the tour, is that his success can make itself present.
"Green Book" relies heavily on the excellent work of Ali and Mortensen. It's not by chance that both have received well-deserved Oscar nominations. The first one proves the excellent moment that is living two years after receiving the supporting statuette for "Moonlight" (2016). His work on the third season of "True Detective" also deserves praise. The second is an actor who is in his third Oscar nomination and almost always does good work.
But beyond that, it is a great story and so necessary to be told in times when racism and prejudice in general against various kinds of peoples, ethnicities, sexual orientations and religions are unfortunately so vivid. They are wounds that still bleed too much when one should work to build a more just and balanced society for all. If each sought to create bridges such as those that united Shirley and Tony, it might be a less lonely, richer and more interesting planet to live for all.