OVP: Green Book (2018)

Film: Green Book (2018)
Stars: Viggo Mortensen, Mahershala Ali, Linda Cardellini
Director: Peter Farrelly
Oscar History: 5 nominations/3 wins (Best Picture*, Original Screenplay*, Actor-Viggo Mortensen, Supporting Actor-Mahershala Ali*, Film Editing)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Like I said this morning, we are going to be getting all of the 2018 Oscar-nominated films (that I've seen and somehow didn't get around to reviewing) onto the blog over the next two weeks.  This is part of a bit of housekeeping around the blog, as I'm currently preparing for four consecutive OVP features (finishing up 2015, and I'm nearly completed viewing of 2016-18 so we'll be able to do them all back-to-back), which will last us right up until the end of the year.  If we're going to do the 2018 films, though, perhaps no movie is in more need of a review than Green Book, the film that actually emerged triumphant from the 2018 Oscars, though that's probably something you wish you could forget.  But if we're going to discuss the year, we can't skip out on it, so let's dive into the movie the Academy thought the finest of last year.

(Spoilers Ahead...though it's real life, so you know, pay attention) The movie is based on the real-life relationship between "Tony Lip" Vallelonga (Mortensen), a New York City bouncer, and Don Shirley (Ali), a renowned African-American pianist who wants to take a tour through the American South, likely going to play in restaurants and clubs where he wouldn't even be allowed to be a patron.  The film shows them developing an unlikely friendship, with Tony trying to ease Shirley into being more "relaxed" while Shirley showing Tony dignity and helps him romance his wife through letters.  The film also focuses on the racism of the era, and to a very small degree the homophobia (there is a scene in the picture where Shirley is arrested for having sex with another man at the YMCA).  The film ends with Shirley performing in a black club, one that would actually serve him, and joining Tony for Christmas at his New York City home, showing that they have emerged from this working relationship as friends.

There's a lot to unpack with Green Book, but I'm going to start with a confession-I get why an older, white audience probably liked this and it won the Oscar, even if I also understand why it shouldn't have.  Green Book is not Vice or Bohemian Rhapsody (man is the 2018 OVP going to be a slog to revisit-I promise not to make it one to read though)-this is a handsomely-made film with watchable actors and a script that makes structural sense & doesn't run overlong.  I'm not going to give it one-star, because I understand what makes a film good or bad if you remove the politics from the decision, and this is nowhere near as bad as those other two Best Picture nominees.

That said, the politics in this film are just cringeworthy and basically ruin whatever quality it tries to attain.  The movie has multiple scenes in the picture where a white man lectures a black man about not understanding the black experience-there are scenes where your shoulders will ark and you'll want to look away you're so confident there were no black people in the writing room that day.  The film received a lot of publicity for not contacting the family of Don Shirley, who proclaimed that most of the movie was lies (though, to be somewhat fair to Farrelly, he did hire the family of Vallelonga for his writing staff, albeit he should've checked both sides of the story here), particularly Shirley's distance from his family and that his relationship with Vallelonga was strictly professional.  The movie totally throws out the random nugget that Shirley is gay, and yet it doesn't remotely explore the idea that this careful, cautious man would randomly hook up with a guy in a YMCA locker room in the middle of the South (Shirley's real-life sexuality was never confirmed, and the YMCA scene was claimed as reality by Vallelonga, though not in as salacious of a way as is depicted in the movie).  This feels like a way to titillate the audience and make Vallelonga the hero once again in saving Shirley, but man does it come across as exploitive.

The movie's acting isn't particularly good, I'm going to be real here.  Mortensen comes across better, adding some physicality to his Tony, but both men are playing surface-level characters without really exploring what is going on underneath these real-life people.  Ali, who is a very fine actor and deserved his Oscar for Moonlight, totally botches his "screaming in the rain" scene, overplaying it and letting the filmmakers run roughshod over anything subtle he's put into Don until that point.  Neither deserved their Oscar nominations, and that Ali actually won for a clear lead performance is heinous.  The film is a cookie-cutter movie, one with a high-budget and enough seemingly well-intentioned warmth that you might forgive it some of its mistakes, but it's too egregious to forgive most of them.