Most Alright Picture of 2018

Rating: 7/10 (8 March 2019)

"The Negro Motorist's Green Book", which took its name from its publisher, one Victor Hugo Green, was guidebook published between the 1930s and 1960s. Its purpose was to help black travellers find hotels and restaurants that would accept them at a time when many such establishments, especially but not exclusively in the South, operated a colour bar. (It will probably come as a surprise to younger viewers to realise that, as recently as the sixties and seventies, the words "negro" and "coloured" were still regarded as perfectly respectful ways of referring to black people. Indeed, in some contexts they were regarded as more acceptable than the word "black" itself).
The film tells the true story of a tour of the Midwest and Deep South undertaken by Don Shirley, an African-American musician, in 1962. Although he was classically trained, there was a widespread feeling at the time that classical music was "white man's music" and that the public would not accept a black classical pianist. His recording company therefore signed him as part of a jazz trio. The film is told from the perspective of Shirley's driver Tony Vallelonga, an Italian-American New Yorker. Tony takes the job because he is temporarily unemployed from his normal work as a nightclub bouncer while the club is being renovated; the concert promoters anticipate that Don is likely to get into trouble with racist elements in the South and that Tony's skills as a bouncer will enable him to double up as Don's bodyguard.
The plot of "Green Book" is essentially that of "Driving Miss Daisy" in reverse; a working-class white man acts as chauffeur to an educated, well-to-do African-American employer. The relationship is initially a difficult one, although the differences between Don and Tony are dealt with in a largely comic way, reminiscent if the differences between Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau's differences in "The Odd Couple". The refined, fastidious Don takes exception to Tony's crude manners and to his standards of honesty, whereas Tony sees Don as a conceited snob. As the tour progresses, however, their relationship becomes a closer one. Tony comes to appreciate Don's skills as a pianist and his literacy, which comes in useful when Don assists Tony with his letters home to his wife Dolores.
Things take a darker turn when the tour enters the South. Don innocently wanders into a whites-only bar in Kentucky and has to be rescued by Tony when he is threatened by a group of angry locals. Tony, whose views on race were previously not particularly liberal, begins to change his mind when he sees the depth of hostility and prejudice displayed by many Southern whites towards blacks. Things come to a head when Tony and Don arrive at their final venue, a country club in Birmingham, Alabama and the management, although happy to allow Don to perform for their guests, refuse to let him eat in their whites-only restaurant.
The film has been praised- in my view rightly- for its acting, with Mahershala Ali, who plays Don Shirley, winning a "Best Supporting Actor" Oscar and Viggo Mortensen (Tony) being nominated for Best Actor. Now I have no problem with the quality of Ali's acting, which was certainly deserving of an award, but the fact that Tony was clearly perceived as the main character suggests there was something odd about the focus of the movie. It suggests that this is a film about racism seen through a white man's eyes, even though black people were the main victims of that racism, and that Don has been relegated to the position of a supporting character in what should have been his own story.
And Don's, I think, would have been the more interesting story. He is an affluent, educated black man whose lifestyle in the cultural milieu of New York has isolated him from the great majority of black Americans- he admits that he has little idea of how they live or of the problems they have to cope with- and yet who is not accepted as an equal by many white Americans. A complicating factor is that he is either gay or bisexual, thus making him a member of two different minorities at a time when prejudice against homosexuals was even more deeply rooted in American society than racial prejudice and was shared by both white and black Americans. Don's sexuality, however, is only mentioned in one single scene, when Tony has to bail Don out after he has been found in a compromising position with a white man in a YMCA bathhouse. During the rest of the film it is not referred to at all. By not pursuing Don's story further, I think that the film-makers missed an opportunity to make a deeper statement about racism and other types of prejudice than they actually did.
This was, of course, the film which won the Academy Award for Best Picture of 2018. I will wait until I have seen more of the possible contenders before I give my opinion as to which film should have won, but my views about this particular award were summed up for me in the words of the BBC's film critic Mark Kermode. He said that there is nothing wrong with "Green Book", that it is alright. They just don't hand out Academy Awards for "Most Alright Picture". 7/10