Green Book is an Oscar-winning film in the tradition of Wings, It Happened One Night, In the Heat of the Night, Midnight Cowboy, The Sting, Chariots of Fire, Rain Man, Driving Miss Daisy, Chicago, and The King’s Speech in which two disparate characters bond over unusual circumstances. As was the case with It Happened One Night, Rain Man, and Driving Miss Daisy, those circumstances take place largely on the road. Peter Farrelly’s film is not, as its detractors claim, a “white savior movie.”

As in all ten of the previous films cited, the two characters help each other unlike in the so-called white savior films in which a white person, through whose sacrifices, a black person is saved. Examples of that type of film include Glory, Amistad, Finding Forrester, Half Nelson, Gran Torino, The Blind Side, and The Help.

The green book referenced in Green Book was officially called “The Negro Motorist Green Book,” an annual guidebook for African-American road-trippers during the Jim Crow era from 1936 through 1966. It was published by African-American New York City mailman Victor Hugo Green, whose life story might make an interesting film of its own. This is not that film, though. The book plays a very small part in this one about a road trip through the deep south in which a distinguished black musician hires a Copacabana Night Club bouncer on hiatus to drive him to a series of engagements. They use the green book to find a place to stay in just one scene in the film.

Oscar nominee Viggo Mortensen is the Italian-American chauffer, Tony Vallelonga aka Tony Lip. Oscar winner Mahershala Ali is classical pianist Doctor Don Shirley who hires him. Although the film has comic overtones and was pretty much sold on those moments, its best scenes are those involving Dr. Shirley’s confrontation with bigotry and the gentlemanly way in which he deals with it from being told he can’t try on a suit in a men’s store but could have it altered if he buys it first to being told he can’t use the restroom in an establishment in which he is performing but must use the outhouse instead to not being able to be seated in the restaurant in another venue where he is the headliner.

(more…)