Peter Farrelly’s crowd-pleaser won Best Picture by refusing to make anyone uncomfortable

Peter Farrelly’s Green Book won the Academy Award for Best Picture, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Supporting Actor for Mahershala Ali. It also won the People’s Choice Award at the Toronto International Film Festival, where it premiered on September 11, 2018, before Universal Pictures released it in the United States on November 16, 2018. It grossed $321 million worldwide. The film is a 2018 American comedy-drama, 130 minutes long, inspired by the true story of a 1962 tour rather than a strict biography.

Trailer, via Universal Pictures.

Tony Lip and the Copacabana

The setup is clean. In the spring of 1962, the Copacabana closes for renovations, and Tony Lip, a Bronx bouncer played by Viggo Mortensen, needs work. He interviews with Don Shirley, an African American pianist who needs a driver for an eight-week concert tour through the Midwest and Deep South. Shirley hires him on the strength of his references. They plan to return to New York City on Christmas Eve.

The Negro Motorist Green Book

Shirley’s record label hands Tony a copy of The Negro Motorist Green Book, the guide for African American travelers founded by Victor Hugo Green in 1936 and published until 1966. It lists the motels, restaurants, and filling stations that would serve them in the Jim Crow South. The film takes its name from that book.

Don Shirley at the Piano

The tour runs on friction. Tony bristles at being asked to act with more refinement; Shirley, haughty and precise, is disgusted by Tony’s habits. Then Tony hears him play and becomes a believer. What follows is the film’s real subject: Shirley’s talent on stage and the discriminatory treatment he meets off it, from his hosts and from the public. In Louisville, Kentucky, white men beat Shirley and threaten him at gunpoint before Tony rescues him. Tony tells him not to go out alone for the rest of the tour.

Eight Weeks, One Tour

The Letters and the Shower

Two scenes carry the film’s best and worst instincts. Shirley helps Tony write eloquent letters home to his wife, Dolores, played by Linda Cardellini, and they move her deeply. Tony pushes Shirley to contact his estranged brother; Shirley hesitates, saying his professional life and achievements have isolated him. Later, Shirley is found in a homosexual encounter with a white man in a public shower, and Tony bribes the police officers at the scene. The film treats the moment as a test of Tony’s decency rather than as Shirley’s story.

Mahershala Ali and Viggo Mortensen

Ali won the supporting actor Oscar, and the performance earns it. He plays Shirley as a man sealed off by his own excellence. Mortensen has the louder part and the easier one — Tony’s arc is a straight line from casual bigotry to warmth, and the screenplay, written by Farrelly with Nick Vallelonga and Brian Hayes Currie, never complicates it. Nick Vallelonga is Tony’s son. The film is based on interviews with Lip and Shirley and on letters Lip wrote to his wife.

What the Awards Missed

Green Book is competent, watchable, and built to be liked. That is the problem. It routes a Black man’s humiliation through a white man’s conscience, and it asks the audience to feel good about the rescue rather than the cost. The criticism the film drew for its racial dynamics and its depiction of Shirley is not noise. It is the accurate reading of a movie that won Best Picture without a Best Director nomination — the fifth to do so, after Wings, Grand Hotel, Driving Miss Daisy and Argo. The film also took the Producers Guild Award, so the three Oscars are not the whole shelf.

The performances are worth the ticket. The frame around them is not.

6.9 of 10, from a Metacritic score of 69/100.

Best Picture · Don Shirley · Green Book · Mahershala Ali · Peter Farrelly · Viggo Mortensen