A Story About Race That Neuters Racism’s Legacy
The Green Book is a film that was made for award season — a story with a message that, in the end, will leave the audience feeling good about themselves when they leave the theater, but that will do little to shake viewers of their preconceived notions about race, class, gender or friendship.
It is based on the true story of a 1962 tour of the Deep South by classical pianist Don Shirley in 1962. Shirley and the record company anticipate trouble — they know the pianist will not be able to stay in the same hotels as his two accompanying musicians and that just being on the road could lead to trouble. So, Shirley hires the nightclub bouncer Tony Vallelonga — Tony Lip — to act as chauffeur and body guard. Lip is a fairly typical early ‘60s character, almost pure stereotype. It is the story of the trip and the budding friendship between unlikely compadres, offering a lesson in race relations that is supposed to send us into the holiday season with a warm heart.
That it accomplishes this goal while failing on so many other levels is a tribute to its lead actors, Viggo Mortensen and Mahershala Ali, who rise above a pedestrian script and direction and offer stellar performances, commanding the screen and fully inhabiting their characters. Mortensen, as Tony Lip, will get the lion’s share of the credit, because. of the physical and vocal transformation — playing a fairly stereotypical Bronx Italian forced him to be more obvious in his acting. He is pure physicality — starting with the violence he unleashes as a bouncer and is forced to use more than once to protect Shirley. He doesn’t eat so much as he inhales. He is about reaction, instinct, and appetite tempered only by his love for and commitment to his wife Delores (played ably by Linda Cardellini, who is not given nearly enough to do in the film).
Ali as Don Shirley is Mortensen’s equal, at least, offering a subtle, controlled reading of the cerebral Shirley, imparting much of his character through gesture and expression. The fear and shame in his eyes when Tony Lip arrives at the YMCA — about midway through the film — where Shirley had been arrested on a morals rap with another (white) man explains more about Shirley’s back story than any of the dialogue offered during the film. These two performances, on their own, should thrust the film into the awards discussion.
The performances, though, may obscure the film’s real shortcomings — a fairly cliched script, a soft-focus view of the time period, and a view of race that should make white liberals feel good.
A.O. Scott in The New York Times writes that “(t)here is virtually no milestone in this tale of interracial male friendship that you won’t see coming from a long way off,” adding that
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.
There is little new about this film. The growth of the relationship between racist, white Lip and effete, snobby (yet black) Shirley follows a familiar feel-good trajectory (even if it turns the formula upside down), and this feel-good approach limits the film’s ability to say something truly unique or even important about race in the United States today.
The argument against this will be that the film is about race in 1962, which is true, but it was written, produced and released in the latter part of the 2010s, a decade that saw the first African-American president give way to a race-baiting charlatan who traffics in rough stereotypes, scapegoating, and nostalgia. It is this world into which this film was birthed, and all art comments on its time, its world, regardless of what time period it covers.
That’s what makes the mise-en-scene so problematic. The recreation of 1962 may look right — with the massive cars, the fashion, and so on — but it is rendered in the kind of nostalgic tones that work for films like A Bronx Tale but that feels inappropriate for the subject matter at hand. We live in a time of what I’ll call “imaginative nostalgia,” a moment in history in which things are on the cusp of change and in which the white (male) majority is responding to its loss of power by reasserting itself and blaming demographic shifts for the nation’s loss of greatness.
The Green Book’s narrative speaks eloquently against this attitude, but the world it creates undercuts the narrative’s argument of unity and friendship — which, given the forces swirling around us today, may not even be the correct argument to make. Black Americans continue to face systemic racism — it looks different, but it’s still here — and making the claim that by just looking at each other as individuals we can get past it is a (white) privileged reading of the desire for racial justice.
This same privileged reading leaves the main racial conflict — the initial disjunction between Lip and Shirley — feeling forced and imbalanced and not really a race-based conflict at all. While the story allows for growth of both characters, with the racist Lip growing more open, it is the impact that Lip has on the cool Ali that sucks all the air out of the room.
Forget the controversy stirred up by Shirley’s family — the film is written partly by Lip’s son and Shirley’s family says it “is full of lies.” The bigger issue is, as BET writes, that the “The movie practically paints Dr. Shirley as a Black man who was estranged from his family and the Black experience, who is in need of Lip to find love for Black pop music, to teach him how to eat fried chicken, and ultimately help him find his way back to the Black community.”
There is a trade-off, of course, the film showing Shirley helping Lip with his diction, with the writing of letters to his wife, but it is the assistance that the physical and “more real” Lip provides to Shirley that captures the viewers’ imagination — as is made clear when Lip tells Shirley that, because the Mortensen character has to scuffle in the streets everyday to get by and Shirley doesn’t Lip is the “blacker” one.
Lip is making a class argument that somehow ignores the political implications of class, one that is supported by the still-extant prejudice against Italian-Americans (Lip punches out a southern cop for just this reason). The limits of the argument, as Shirley explains, is that the pianist can never escape his black skin. But that basic truth is not fully explored, and it is Shirley, in the end, who is saved — both by finding common ground with working class blacks and by finding a family in Lip’s. This, ultimately, is key to understanding the film’s politics.
Brooke Obie, managing editor of Shadow and Act, explained the issues this way (according to BET):
“The main issues for me with Green Book are that it centers a white man’s experience in what should have been, according to the title, a Black story; and it misrepresents the (Negro Motorist) Green Book and it misrepresents Dr. Shirley. So, whether audiences would enjoy the film should be secondary to questions of whether this film harms Dr. Shirley’s legacy, whether it harms his living family members, and whether it harms Black people as a whole.”
She continued, “I think to consistently see our stories and our Black icons filtered through the lens of a racist white person like Tony Lip does nothing to advance the understanding of Black history and only serves to perpetuate white supremacy.”
One of the things that struck me as I sat in the theater was the reaction from the largely (nearly all) white audience to the racial slurs tossed out easily by the Bronx Italians who worked alongside Lip, who lived in his neighborhood and were his brothers and brothers-in-law. In the mouth of the Italians — often rendered in Italian — the slurs were defanged, allowing the audience to laugh. Were they laughing at the slurs or with them? I can’t say, but this “colorful language” has the same feel of nostalgia that too much of the rest of the film has.
The violence attendant with southern racism is somewhat muted, as well, which allows the film to progress without the kind of foreboding that should be present in every moment as the two men travel through the southern states. We should be nervous as Lip drives, worried that the calm of any moment could explode. But, for the most part, we are spared that feeling, as we are asked to see a distinct difference between southern and northern racism that lets the North off the hook.
I don’t mean to downplay the real joys that this film provides — it is worth watching the film for the music alone, along with Mortensen and Ali’s performances. But I suspect white and black audiences will react differently to what they see on the screen, because whites and black still experience race differently and continue to have a very different view of what racial progress and racial justice mean.