Choose Kermit

Rating: 5/10 (26 February 2019)

"He's sick. He got poison in his system," the black man explains to his Machiavellian host, as being the reason for the white man's anemic condition. Cullen(Sidney Poitier) and "Joker"(Tony Curtis), once warring fugitives on the run, to both men's surprise, are still chained to each other, even after the woman, an unconditional racist(Cara Williams), unshackles their wrists. It matters to both of them, if the other one lives or dies. John's concern for Cullen is beyond the woman's comprehension."What did I do wrong? the single mother asks, when John finds out that the directions she gave Cullen is a death trap. Nothing but bogs and quicksand; nothing to be concerned about, because a black man is nothing. "Why do you get so excited about that 'Negro' for?" she screams. It's the late-fifties. The incident involving those three civil rights workers who went missing in Neshoba County was still a little ways off. For now, it's Mississippi simmering. But what was the audience thinking; these average everyday people from an era who internalized institutional racism like breathing? This mutual respect, this male bonding of disparates, welded together by altruistic materials, to a large degree, must have estranged them. Even to the most progressive-minded moviegoer, down deep inside, there existed a latent feeling of repulsion, a self-awareness they would never own up to having. These proto-liberals may have loved jazz, Jackie Robinson, and the idea of civil rights, but when put to the test, in life, or being a voyeur in the dark observing an imitation of life, they recoiled at the idea of a white man choosing friendship(WITH A "NEGRO"!) over romance(WITH A WOMAN!). Before the sea change in 1964, the year that gave black people the right to vote, the spectacle of a black man in a white woman's house, chained, and then, shockingly unchained, was new to film language. The grandparents sitting in these movie palaces, lest not we forget, saw D.W. Griffith's "The Birth of a Nation" as small children. They remember Gus pursuing Flora on the mountain. Gus was up to no good; he had only one thing on his mind. It was rhetoric. It was propaganda. It worked. They remember Flora jumping off the mountain. They blamed Gus for the suicide. Cullen, in their estimation, should sleep outside, not on the couch. But they know, however, that mother and son have no choice; they don't begrudge the woman's need to compromise. The small family is counting on "Joker" to get them out of this one-horse town. The boy's mother listens to Cullen. John needs a bed. It must be something he ate. Their last meal, frog, roasted over an open fire, is the likely culprit for his indisposed condition. Made in 1958, Stanley Kramer's "The Defiant Ones" should be one for the time capsule. But, alas, "time keeps on slippin', slippin', slippin', into the future."
The white chauffeur just bought a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken. He presumes that all black folks love the sizzling and popping sounds a broiler makes in an oil vat. On a nondescript Kentucky two-lane road, in "Green Book", Tony Vallelonga(Viggo Mortensen) passes a drumstick over the car seat headrest to his employer, the classical and jazz pianist Don Shirley(Mahershala Ali). He practically waves the drumstick in Don's face. Stop. Rewind. Mull over this for a second. Who is the boss here: the Copacabana ball-busting bouncer with the hair-trigger temper, or the refined musician adored by the cognoscenti who live in the rarefied world of "haute couture" circles. Tony should ask first. After all, the two just met. It wasn't so long ago that the Italian-American working stiff, a husband and father of small boys, removed two empty glasses from their kitchen sink because the lips of black men, plumbers who fixed their leaky pipes, drank his wife's freshly squeezed lemonade. He places them gently in the rubbish can. This illiberal action is the predictable repercussions from living in an insular world. Tony's extended family, under the pretense of watching a baseball game, keeps a watchful eye over Dolores(Linda Cardellini) and her unwanted guests. The audience can infer that if Tony was the person of the house, the help would have found themselves drinking from a water hose. Tony, at this juncture, is an honest-to-goodness, unrepentant bigot. But "Green Book" treats his antipathetic views toward the "other" with a light touch. Played for laughs, Tony refuses to put Don's luggage into the trunk. There is a standoff between this Italian chauffeur and an Indian manservant. Finally, Amit(Iqbal Theba), flabbergasted at such hubris, in a gracious display of humility, relents and does the job. Ha-ha, right? Later, on wheels, Tony needs a roadside bathroom break, somewhere, in woods. The hired man leaves, but then on second thought, returns and grabs his wallet off the dashboard. Don should be outraged and offended, and yet, he gives his driver a bewildered look, when a look of anger and resentment would have been the right emotional visage.
Somewhere along that long drive through the deeply segregated south, "Green Book" needed a scene in which Tony opens up about his issues with people of color, a man-to-man talk. The bouncer and the musician, of course, would become lifelong pals, but the film portrays the bond as a foregone conclusion, and skips the growing pains that led up to their mutual respect for each other. "I've never had fried chicken in my life," Don says with dignity barely intact. He should be aghast now, not later on at the plantation house, by this racially-charged slight, but because "Green Book" is calibrated to be a feel-good movie, the pianist reacts in a genteel manner, which would seem at odds with an employer being taunted by his paid employee, a subordinate. The car should be ordered to stop, but the car keeps moving, because the filmmaker keeps moving without breaks, without looking at the rear-view mirror. When Don asks for "plates and utensils", then complains about how this tactile approach to eating fried chicken will sully his hands and stain the blanket on his lap with grease, the musician's persnickety mannerisms has the accidental effect of being an alternative minstrel show. Don Shirley dons whiteface. Later, the ugly stereotype gets reintroduced, in which the honored guest at a formal dinner, is served the aforementioned bird by his host, a patron of the arts. Needless to say, the music lovers who join Don at the fancy table, coos in approval. Finally, here is racism, without the kid gloves, without training wheels.But it's too little, too late. The intended shock that we're supposed to feel never registers in full. The horror of the moment has been destigmatized, because such categorical pigeonholing that dictates the preferences and abhorrences of lower men as deemed by the gatekeepers, played as comedy the first time around. When all the brown flesh is torn away from the drumstick, Don asks, "What do we do about the bones?" The presumptuous chauffeur takes his skeleton breast and flings it out the car window. The piano virtuoso does so, likewise. He can learn so much from Tony.
"BlacKkKlansman" ends with an epilogue, a blowtorch of a coda that sets fire to the William Shakespeare quote: "What's past is prologue." Unlike "Green Book", Spike Lee knows the story of love and hate isn't over. It's the story of Kermit and Pepe. Two sides, watching "The Defiant Ones" for the first time, sees the frog that best suits their ideology. Will one side notice that John is the one that gets sick? "Green Book" means well. It's not a bad film; it's just the wrong film for our times.
The road trip isn't over.