Tonight I watched Green Book (2018), which is a biographical film directed by Peter Farrelly about Tony “Lip” Vallelonga, a bouncer from an Italian-American neighborhood in the Bronx, who is hired by Dr. Don Shirley, a world-class Black pianist, to drive him on a concert tour that includes the Deep South.
Tony Vallelonga was more racist that I expected at the beginning of the film, going so far as to throw away cups that the black workers who visited his home drank out of. In addition, although him and his wife never discuss it, it’s clear that they have differing views on the matter when his wife finds the cups in the trash and recovers them.
Although Tony starts off as a polite but racist person, as he drives Shirley around he becomes more accepting and understanding due to the increasing disgust he has towards the situations the pair ends up in. One of these notable moments is when Tony and Shirley are pulled over for being in a sundown town after dark and then being arrested after Tony punches a cop who was racist to him. Another is at the end, when Shirley is disallowed from eating in the whites-only dining area that he is contracted to perform at. Between these events, there are many smaller incidents that develop Tony’s character arc.
The film was enjoyable enough, especially during the moments where I felt like the adversarial people in the story got what they deserved. However, I couldn’t help but feel like the story was a little too smooth and easygoing because most interpersonal conflicts between characters were low-stakes and the change in Tony seems effortless as it seems to just happen from exposure to the various situations. The critic consensus on Rotten Tomatoes concurs with this assessment, reading:
Green Book takes audiences on an excessively smooth ride through bumpy subject matter, although Mahershala Ali and Viggo Mortensen’s performances add necessary depth. 1
I was also disappointed to find that the depiction of some characters were not as well researched and truthful as I would have liked. Specifically, there was a controversy where Shirley’s descendants did not approve of the film, saying that the movie’s portrayal of Shirley’s character was “a symphony of lies” and that Shirley specifically rejected efforts by Tony Lip’s son to make a movie about their friendship. 2 I also found that Jüri Täht, who was depicted as Oleg in the film, was dismayed by the fact that Oleg was Russian in the film because he was an Estonian whose family had to flee the USSR. However, I couldn’t find a good source for this outside of Wikipedia due to the Wikipedia citation being a book I couldn’t get access to online. 3