One Odd Couple for the Road...

Rating: 9/10 (25 March 2020)

This is a fine movie about what makes for friendship across cultures. At the beginning, the gruff 'Tony Lip' Vallelonga played by Viggo Mortensen seems too down with it and streetwise to meaningfully bond with the exalting Doctor Don Shirley as stirringly represented by Mahershala Ali. However, through the course of the narrative, their characters prove to have complementary angles that eventually add up to the 180 degrees needed for a stable friendship.
The truth is people like Doctor Don Shirley are much more familiar to me than characters like John Shaft and Priest Youngblood. Black Folks can seem like everyday people until you sit down and talk to them and gradually find they are revealed as highly accomplished, and, more often than not, formally or informally expert in some field or another. I knew this fellow named Amos, an older gentleman I worked with when I was transporting cars around the lot at Hertz Rent-A-Car. Anyone could tell him about a major or minor problem they were having with their car, and you would swear you were listening to Sherlock Holmes, the way he could deduce from signs and symptoms what was wrong with your automobile, or less charitably, a professor at a Community College giving a lecture on Automotive Mechanics.
We would hear about what happened to the John Shaft and Priest Youngblood types in anecdotes. Usually, how they had been thrown in the river or died in some kind of shootout. But the Don Shirleys of the world I more easily found myself crossing paths with in some way or another. There were the magnetic and charismatic individuals like Reverend Spahn, who would come to our house and wax rhapsodic about Gandhi, and the sense of liberation he discovered and experienced devoting himself to the service of others. There were other folks like the Reverend Tommy Butler, who wrote and directed the Pulitzer Prize caliber musical SELMA, with followers and devotees comparing him to Duke Ellington, not withstanding that he was also a third degree Black Belt in Tae Kwon Do. So running into every day people who, when you scratched the surface, were highly accomplished in one way or another, was more commonplace within the Black Community than you might imagine.
Doctor Don Shirley, you could say, represents the apex of his ilk. A man who, evidently, spoke several languages and was the proud possessor of several academic degrees, while being feted around the world as a great classical and jazz pianist. He still finds himself, whether he realizes it or not, in need of serious security and the muscle of an Italian American bouncer, notwithstanding his true status as a member of intellectual and artistic royalty. He will also be depending on a guide book compiled by Victor Hugo Green as he makes his way through the Midwest and the racism of the Deep South with his concert tour.
There are surprises galore as the two men evolve past their own prejudices against each other and use their wits and good will to navigate through the chauvinism of their times. The director Peter Farrelly, with a penetrating sociological and psychological insight that hits more often than it misses, drives along with this unlikely pair through the cold and the snow home to the rousing musical score of Kris Bowers. Seems we are just in time for dinner, not far from the street sign that reads LIFETIME FRIENDSHIP.
I would also like to thank a beloved friend for recommending this movie to me and bringing me here as well.