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"still serves a significant purpose to remind white audiences of the difficulties faced by those of colour.

Positive critique - author states "It’s a crowd-pleaser that will play well to a wide audience, a quality that’s often slightly limiting for some of the issues we’re presented with."

The author is also trying to convey the message of race.

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The thesis is: “Green Book” can’t heal racism, but it’s a reminder that spending time with people different from ourselves, even if only in the dark on a movie screen, can be the key to combating prejudice.

The author should restructure their thesis to the beginning of the writing. Instead of summarizing the movie they should support their thesis with arguments that connect to the thesis. While explaining how this movie only acted as band aid to racism.

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Green Book is a movie about class as well as race, and Farrelly rightly refuses to paint a pretty picture.

Ali, a Best Supporting Actor Oscar winner for Moonlight, is superb at finding the buried rage in a refined artist challenging fellow Americans who never accepted the abolition of slavery.
“I’m blacker than you are,” the working-class driver snaps.

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thesis: But it’s more of a shock given that the material edges him into more serious-minded fare than usual in telling the true story behind the friendship of renowned pianist Donald Shirley and his driver Tony Lip.

thesis: Early in the film, we’re shown that, while glossily presented, Farrelly, writing with actor-producer Brian Hayes Currie and Tony Lip’s son Nick Vallelonga, won’t be sugarcoating tensions of the time

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The crispy poultry motif figures heavily in the “Green Book” trailers, conceivably as a warning. Every suspicion you might entertain — that this will be a sentimental tale of prejudices overcome and common humanity affirmed; that its politics will be as gently middle-of-the-road as its humor; that it will invite a measure of self-congratulation about how far we, as a nation, have come — will be confirmed.

The author critiques the movie as cliche and states that "there is also something about this movie that prevented me from collapsing into a permanent cringe as I watched it." He provides a general idea that the movie was cliche and therefore it did not provide the audience with any new ideas of information to work with.

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'Green Book' Review: Odd-Couple Dramedy Is Timely Feel-Good Movie

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'Green Book' turns the '60s true story of two men, music, race and class into the feel-good movie of 2018, says Peter Travers. Our review.

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Peter Farrelly narrates a sequence from his film featuring Viggo Mortensen and Mahershala Ali. Credit Credit Universal Pictures

"Green Book" is a road movie set in 1962, long before Apple or Google Maps or Waze, but as it makes its way from New York to Alabama and back, you might nonetheless imagine a little GPS voice in your ear telling you what's up ahead.

There is virtually no milestone in this tale of interracial male friendship that you won't see coming from a long way off, including scenes that seem too corny or misguided for any movie in its right mind to contemplate. "Siri, please tell me they're not going there." Oh, but they are.

"There" includes an entire subplot devoted to fried chicken, which the African-American member of the buddy duo has never eaten. He eventually (spoiler alert) acquires a taste, thanks in part to the urgings of his white counterpart.

The crispy poultry motif figures heavily in the "Green Book" trailers, conceivably as a warning. Every suspicion you might entertain - that this will be a sentimental tale of prejudices overcome and common humanity affirmed; that its politics will be as gently middle-of-the-road as its humor; that it will invite a measure of self-congratulation about how far we, as a nation, have come - will be confirmed.

Because the white guy, an erstwhile nightclub bouncer named Frank Anthony Vallelonga and known as Tony Lip (Viggo Mortensen), is behind the wheel of a car while the black guy, the pianist and composer Don Shirley (Mahershala Ali), rides in back, "Green Book" seems to invite comparison to "Driving Miss Daisy." But its pedigree is slightly different, reaching back through the Gene Wilder-Richard Pryor comedies of the 1970s to "The Defiant Ones" in 1958, which starred Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis as runaway convicts in the Jim Crow South.

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Mortensen and Ali in the film, set in 1962 and based on a real story. Credit Universal Studios

If you want to get scholarly about it, you could stretch the tradition even further, following literary critics like Leslie Fiedler and D.H. Lawrence and seeing Tony and Don as manifestations of a primal American archetype. Huck and Jim. Ishmael and Queequeg. Natty and Chingachgook - bonded cross-cultural pairs that symbolically redeem America of its original racial sin.
[Read more about the real Don Shirley.]
"Green Book," written and directed by Peter Farrelly (of the once notoriously naughty Farrelly Brothers), is based on a true story. Tony Lip and Don Shirley were real people, and the movie grounds their journey to the South in piquant historical details. The book referenced in the title was a guide used by black motorists to help them avoid the dangers and indignities of road travel, especially below the Mason-Dixon line. Don's record company, having booked him on a tour through several southern states, hires Tony to serve as a de facto bodyguard as well as a chauffeur.

He also becomes, inevitably, a kind of white savior, intervening to shield his employer, when he can, from white people who have no such obligation. The hypocrisies of segregation are laid out - Don is celebrated as an artist and denied service at hotels and restaurants - as are the brutal and insidious manifestations of white supremacy.

The real drama, and also the comedy, is between the two men. The contrast of their temperaments is not subtle. Don, highly accomplished and educated - he's "Dr. Shirley" to most, "Doc" to Tony - is formal and fastidious, an aesthete and an intellectual with no patience for vulgarity or sloppiness. He's also gay, though this fact is handled with a discretion that borders on squeamishness. Tony is a caricature of Italian-American family-man exuberance. He's voluble and emotional and constantly smoking, eating, or both at the same time. At one point, reclining in a hotel-room bed, he folds a pizza in half and shoves it in his mouth. Not a slice of pizza. The whole pie.

His warm, earthy authenticity has a salutary effect on Don, whose hauteur masks a deep loneliness. In return, Don refines Tony's taste and dissolves his prejudices. As I said, there's not much here you haven't seen before, and very little that can't be described as crude, obvious and borderline offensive, even as it tries to be uplifting and affirmative.

And yet! There is also something about this movie that prevented me from collapsing into a permanent cringe as I watched it. Or rather, two things: the lead performances. (Linda Cardellini, as Tony's wife, Dolores, is wonderful too, but she's only around at the beginning and the end.) Mortensen, plump as a mortadella, doesn't so much transcend the ethnic clichés of the role as chew through them, emerging into a zone of vaudevillian poetry. Ali, more or less the straight man in the double act, approaches every moment with a razor-fine wit, a lively awareness of the absurdity of the situation that may not belong to the character alone.

These men are good company, even if the trip itself might cause some queasiness.

Green Book

Writers

Nick Vallelonga , Brian Hayes Currie , Peter Farrelly

Stars

Linda Cardellini , Viggo Mortensen , Mahershala Ali , Don Stark , Sebastian Maniscalco

Genres

Biography , Comedy , Drama

Movie data powered by IMDb.com

Green Book
Rated PG-13. Some mean white people, but they're not all like that. Running time: 2 hours 10 minutes.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page C10 of the New York edition with the headline: A Road Trip With Friendship and Clichés. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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'Green Book' Review: A Road Trip Through a Land of Racial Clichés

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"Green Book" is a road movie set in 1962, long before Apple or Google Maps or Waze, but as it makes its way from New York to Alabama and back, you might nonetheless imagine a little GPS voice in your ear telling you what's up ahead.

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Green Book review - charming deep south road trip is worth taking

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Strong performances from Viggo Mortensen and Mahershala Ali highlight a broadly entertaining crowd-pleaser about racial division in the 1960s

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OK, class, who can explain what a Green Book is? For those who don't know, it was a handbook for black motorists seeking "vacation without aggravation," an indispensable travel guide listing friendly places to stay and tips for avoiding trouble in the Jim Crow South. As such, " Green Book " makes a clever title for a road movie unlike any other: the true story of the unlikely friendship between a black concert pianist and the New York City bouncer hired to chauffeur him through unfriendly territory.

Although inspirational on its surface, the film presents a pretty bleak picture of intolerance in 1962 America, when segregation and other openly racist policies would have made such a trip a dangerous prospect for a wealthy, well-educated black man, with or without a bruiser like Frank Anthony Vallelonga to watch his back. Featuring a pair of terrific performances by Viggo Mortensen as a goombah with a heart of gold and Mahershala Ali as multilingual composer-musician Don Shirley, the story may be unique, yet it goes pretty much exactly the way you might expect, with one huge twist: The credits read "Directed by Peter Farrelly " - which means this feel-good tour through American bigotry was made by one-half of the sibling duo responsible for "Dumb and Dumber" and "There's Something About Mary."

Turns out, that's not such a bad thing, considering that the Farrelly brothers (whose gross-out sensibility ushered in the current era of R-rated comedies) showed that they were really a couple of sentimental softies somewhere around the time of "Shallow Hal." Besides, if ever there was a project to challenge audiences' assumptions about what certain people are capable of, this is it.

A play-it-safe crowd-pleaser in the family-friendly vein of "Hidden Figures" and "The Help" - movies that condemn racism as if the problem were already solved rather than still alive and well - "Green Book" may as well be "Driving Miss Daisy" in reverse, focusing on the inevitable fireworks when an elegant black man hires an ill-mannered guy from the Bronx to drive him around the South. It works on account of the chemistry between the two leads, both of whom are showing audiences a different side of themselves.

Enjoying his first starring role post-"Moonlight," Ali may as well be playing the opposite of the empathetic drug dealer whose too-brief screen time in the first segment of Barry Jenkins' film lifted the entire experience: Dr. Don Shirley is a regal black man whose cultured upbringing makes him an uptight Henry Higgins type to Mortensen's Tony (who calls him "Doc" for short). Meanwhile, packing on 30 pounds to play a good old boy from the Bronx, Viggo gets a laugh every time he opens his mouth - always for one of two purposes: either to hustle whoever's listening into giving him what he wants (hence his nickname, "Tony Lip") or else to stuff food inside it (he seems to spend half the movie eating, whether it's engaging in hot dog-eating contests at the local diner or alone in his hotel room, folding a pizza in half for a late-night snack).

We seldom get to see Mortensen in comic roles, but his goofy, sideways smile seems perfectly suited to this one, making it hard - even when he's saying things that are nowhere near politically correct - to dislike the guy for long. Then again, it's the responsibility of movies like this to remind audiences that attitudes were not always so enlightened when it comes to race relations in this country, and "Green Book" does a fine job of depicting the rampant disrespect that people of color were shown not only in the Deep South but also in New York City, where Shirley keeps an elaborately decorated apartment above Carnegie Hall (end-credits photos suggest the production designers actually downplayed his eclectic decorating style).

Costume designer Betsy Heimann outfits Ali in period-specific clothes that make it perfectly clear, from the moment he first appears on-screen, that Shirley is proud of his heritage and, for the remainder of the film, that he belongs to a much better class than Tony, who's seen splattering a client's blood across the front of his red Copacabana blazer in the opening scene. When the club closes for renovations, working-class Tony needs to find another gig fast, so long as it's honest (if he's not careful, the Sopranos-like local crime families will have him doing shady side jobs), which is how he finds himself interviewing for the role of Dr. Shirley's driver on an eight-week concert tour - which will mean leaving wife Linda Cardellini home with the kids, while Shirley's two fellow musicians, bassist Mike Hatton and Russian cellist Dimiter D. Marinov, take their own car.

One of the running themes in "Green Book" - and perhaps the quality two guys from such different cultural backgrounds saw and respected in each other - is these men each observe unwritten codes of honesty and honor, and though they don't always align, they come from a place of personal integrity. Of course, it's a nice reversal that, as this uncouth white guy's boss, Shirley has the power to insist that Tony adhere to his values, which means forcing him to return a "lucky rock" stolen from a roadside stand. Later, as their dynamic starts to loosen, they trade requests: Tony talks Shirley into trying some genuine Kentucky Fried Chicken, but Shirley gets the last laugh, insisting that Tony go back after tossing his empty soda cup out the window.

The movie would be plenty amusing if it were focused entirely on these two characters getting to know each another, opening one another's eyes in the process. But given their route, it's the audience's eyes that are opened as "Green Book" shows just how inhuman Americans could be to their neighbors in 1962: At first, it's just the indignity of not being allowed to eat, sleep, or relieve oneself in the same establishments, until one night in Kansas, when Shirley ventures into a bar alone and receives a beating for the simple fact of being black. Tony shows up just in time to rescue Shirley from the rednecks' clutches, but it's a clue to the abuse that lies ahead - not only from belligerent hicks but also from the police (they're pulled over more than once) and, most insultingly, from the high-society whites who've engaged Shirley's services.

Oh, but to hear Shirley play! Mortensen's role may be the showier of the two, but Ali is a marvel to watch in his musical performances. The actor suggests Eddie Murphy in "Coming to America" crossed with the composure Adrien Brody brought to "The Pianist," where performing serves as a way to communicate across cultural differences, and also to redirect the frustration of all the ways he has been mistreated. Constantly rewarding us with music, the soundtrack mixes the trio's concert pieces with "black music" that Shirley doesn't recognize - like Little Richard and Chubby Checker - culminating in an impromptu Christmas concert and the group-hug ending audiences want. "Green Book" can't heal racism, but it's a reminder that spending time with people different from ourselves, even if only in the dark on a movie screen, can be the key to combating prejudice.
Related: "Green Book" Is a Story Perfect for Today

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OK, class, who can explain what a Green Book is? For those who don't know, it was a handbook for black motorists seeking "vacation without aggravation," an indispensable travel guide listing friendly places to stay and tips for avoiding trouble in the Jim Crow South.