Green Book (2018)

Rated PG-13: Running time: 2 hours, 10 min.

Visual Parables content ratings (1-10): Violence 3; Language 4; Sex/Nudity 3.

“Green Book,” directed by Peter Farrelly, is inspired by the true story of a 1962 tour of the Deep South by African American pianist Dr. Don Shirley and Italian American bouncer Frank “Tony Lip” Vallelonga, who served as Shirley's driver and bodyguard.

Written by Farrelly with Vallelonga's son Nick and Brian Hayes Currie, the film is based on interviews with Vallelonga and Shirley, as well as letters Vallelonga wrote to his wife.

The movie is named after “The Negro Motorist Green Book,” a guide to services and places relatively friendly to African American travelers, founded by Victor Hugo Green in 1936 and published until 1966.

“While the story is predictable,” says Ed McNulty, “it moves beyond the cliché of a Black/white relationship benefitting both characters, managing to reveal that ending American racism is more than changing the hearts and minds of individuals, we also have to address institutional and systemic racism.”

Bronx-dwelling Tony Vallelonga (Viggo Mortensen), known as Tony Lip, is the opposite of the cosmopolitan Dr. Donald Shirley (Mahershala Ali). Vallelonga’s job as bouncer at New York’s Copacabana Club is put on hold when the club is shut down for renovation due to a complaint by a drunken, but influential, customer Vallelonga had tossed out and beaten up. Vallelonga looks forward to spending more time with his wife Dolores (Linda Cardellini) and their two young sons, and turns down a lucrative offer to work with a gang of mobsters. However, he responds positively when he is called about “a doctor” who needs a driver.

Vallelonga is perplexed when he arrives at the address given to him: Carnegie Hall. He soon learns “doctor” is an academic title and that Dr. Donald Shirley lives above the hall. He is surprised at how lavishly the apartment is decorated. Shirley explains that he needs a chauffeur for the eight weeks leading up to Christmas, one who will also serve as protector because his concert tour is set mostly in the Deep South. It is 1962, the year after the Freedom Riders had been met with violent responses in the South when they tried to integrate buses and bus station restrooms. Shirley asks Vallelonga if it will be a problem to work for a Black man. Vallelonga says it is not, even though we have already seen evidence of his racism earlier in the film.

Shirley performs with two fellow musicians, bassist George (Mike Hatton) and Russian cellist Oleg (Dimiter D. Marinov), so the record company has provided two tail-finned Cadillacs for their trip, the parties meeting up at the clubs, mansions, and school halls where they will be playing. The tension between Vallelonga and Shirley, due to their class and racial differences, is seen in several ways including music played on the car radio, food choices, and trash disposal.

During their conversations, Shirley reveals his loneliness resulting from not belonging to the Black or the white worlds, as well as being divorced, and alienated from his brother. “The Negro Motorist Green Book” that he has brought along as their guide to southern facilities accentuates this. There are so few places in the Jim Crow South that will house or feed Blacks, that such a guidebook is a necessity for African Americans wanting a safe and secure journey through what amounts to enemy territory. Most of the motels listed turn out to be pretty seedy compared to the ones where Vallelonga and the other members of the trio can stay. To Vallelonga’s comments on southern segregation Shirley replies, “Does geography really matter? Would it be any different in a bar in your neighborhood?”

They encounter dangerous and/or humiliating situations. At a posh affair Shirley is not allowed to use the restaurant facilities. They are stopped by a racist cop in Alabama and jailed when Vallelonga loses his temper over being insulted because of his Italian heritage. In several instances Vallelonga manages to extricate them either by muscle or his glib tongue, but this time it is Shirley ’s friendship with U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy that springs them from jail after a phone call. Shirley explains that they must always use nonviolence, his goal being to win by maintaining his dignity.

As they warm up to each other, Shirley giving as much as receiving from their relationship, we see a humorous touch of Cyrano de Bergerac in the sequence in which Tony is keeping his promise to Dolores to write to her often. Tony’s one-sheet letters are written in short sentences with lots of crossed out words. During a lunch outside a Stuckey’s, Shirley asks to see what his driver is writing and offers to help in their composition. He dictates lines containing similes that make the missives far more interesting. After several such sessions of dictation Vallelonga catches on, able to better express his deep love for his wife and how much he is missing her. In shots that show her smiling as she reads them, we see how much she is pleased.

This road trip/buddy film aims for the heart. That it ends on Christmas Eve adds to its emotional impact. The festive family feast that the now changed Vallelonga returns to will remind some Christians of the Messianic banquet depicted by Jesus about a time beyond time when all people will sit down at a laden table to celebrate the triumph of goodness over evil. The film recognizes that although individual hearts can be changed, racism itself will go on until society itself is transformed. In several instances, Shirley has to swallow his pride and, if he resists, pay the price, especially when he arrives at a fancy night club and is told he cannot use the facilities or eat there before his performance. No argument, not even his threat to refuse to play, has any effect upon the white manager.

The film’s effectiveness is especially due to the talents of the two stars. Viggo Mortensen, putting on 30 pounds, is convincing as the family-devoted but prejudiced Italian in need of cultivation of manners and temperament. He is rough, but possesses an inner core of decency that connects to that of his erudite boss. Mahershala Ali conveys the loneliness of the outsider who is at home in neither the white or the Black world. His insistence upon his dignity becomes a major attraction to Vallelonga, opening the latter’s mind and heart to their common humanity.

There has been some negative reaction to the film from Shirley’s family, members of which claim that Vallelonga has been made the hero of the story, typical of the Hollywood practice of depicting whites as a savior figure for needy Blacks (as in “Blindside” or “Cry Freedom”). It is true, as they point out, that the writing team consists of three white men – Peter Farrelly, Nick Vallelonga, and Brian Hayes Currie. However, I think when you see the film it will be evident that Shirley’s character is just as much center-stage as his white employee. Vallelonga’s son Nick is one of the scriptwriters and reports that as far back as the 80s he had talked with Shirley about turning the story of his father and the artist into a film, and that Shirley told him to wait until he had passed on and to tell the truth about them both. This apparently meant his gayness which is depicted in a scene set in a YMCA, something that perhaps he did not want to contend with during that anti-gay period (Shirley died in 2013, just a few months after Vallelonga passed away.)

Although written and directed by white men, the film does pay genuine tribute to Shirley. One scene includes some words from a New York Times 1982 interview in which Shirley says “The Black experience through music, with a sense of dignity, that’s all I have ever tried to do.”

That he achieved his goal is well evidenced in the many portions of songs that Shirley is depicted as playing. They are a mixture of jazz, pop, and classical. Early on, as Vallelonga stands at the back watching his boss play, we can see the beginning of his respect for him. In typical Vallelonga fashion he tells his wife that he’s as good as Liberace.

This biographical film might not be billed as a musical, but it is certainly music-filled. The film’s soundtrack composer Kris Bowers, himself a pianist, was impressed by Shirley’s musical inventiveness when he listened to Shirley’s many records to decide which he would rerecord. “‘Lullaby of Birdland’ was one of the first ones that I knew I wanted to include, because he starts off quoting a couple of classical pieces, and then when he goes into the song, it’s almost like a false start, because he uses the melody as the beginning of a fugue,” Bowers said in an interview. “He’s doing a proper fugue, exposing the subject, et cetera, within a jazz context. I listened to that and said, ‘Wow, I’ve never heard anybody do that before.’”

The script does err in failing to reveal that Shirley was far more accomplished and familiar with jazz than revealed in the script. He was a friend of Duke Ellington and debuted his “New World a-Comin’” at Carnegie Hall in 1955. He also was a composer whose classical works had been recorded and played by major symphonic orchestras in this country and London. He was also such a talented painter that one of his works was used as the album cover for “Don Shirley: An Improvisation Based on the Story Orpheus in the Underworld.”

Knowing this makes his treatment by southern hosts seem all the more reprehensible. It also calls for someone to make a full biography of this amazing, but largely overlooked musician and artist.

For Reflection/Discussion

1. Describe the two main characters – Donald Shirley and Tony Vallelonga – and what seem to be their values.
2. What do you think of the charge from the Shirley family that the film is like so many other films, such as “Driving Miss Daisy,” “Blindside,” or “Cry Freedom,” in that the white “savior” figure is made the main character? And what about this subgenre of films being attacked by some Black critics as a favorite of white liberals because it absolves them of guilt of complicity in institutional racism?
3. What is “The Negro Motorist Green Book”? Why was it needed? How might it be seen as a map through a minefield?
4. How do we see that Tony is prejudiced? How is what he did after the Black plumbers left his kitchen equivalent to pairs of southern water fountains marked “White” and “Colored”? During a discussion of segregation, how does this go with Dr. Shirley’s questions "Does geography really matter? Would it be any different in a bar in your neighborhood?"
5. Why do you think Dr. Shirley does not want to try eating the piece of fried chicken? Similar to why so many have shunned watermelon, a reaction against racial stereotyping?
6. What is it about Tony that irritates Dr. Shirley? His manners; his smoking; crude speech; littering; his temper…? How does he help his chauffeur? How do we see this affecting even Tony’s relationship with Dolores?
7. What do you think of the situations in which Dr. Shirley cannot eat in or use the facilities of the very establishments in which he is the star performer? How do we see the Proverbs passage about strength in friendship playing out?
8. What do you think of the advice he had been given that he should play pop music because an audience would not accept a black classical pianist? What impact must such advice have had on black musicians over the years? (And this despite singer Marian Anderson’s successful mall concert at the Lincoln Memorial in 1939!)
9. When police stop them at night, one cop, having trouble with Tony’s name, utters an insult against Italians. How does Tony react? How have Italians also been stereotyped and been labeled by prejudiced people?
10. What do you think of Dr. Shirley’s advice about nonviolence and that one wins by maintaining one’s dignity? How does his demeanor show that dignity is very important to him?
11. We see personal prejudice in Tony and racist club managers and cops, but what constitutes institutional racism? The Jim Crow laws enforced by the cops? The accepted customs, expressed in “This is the way we do things here” and such? The refusal of southern white churches to allow blacks to join, and in many cases, even to worship with their members? Or in the North, the unequal treatment given to whites and blacks by the police, banks, real estate agents, employers, and others in positions of power and authority?
12. Thoreau reminds us in his “Essay on Civil Disobedience” of the power of saying “No” to injustice: “I know this well, that if one thousand, if one hundred, if ten men whom I could name – if ten honest men only – ay, if one HONEST man, in this State of Massachusetts, ceasing to hold slaves, were actually to withdraw from this co-partnership, and be locked up in the county jail therefor, it would be the abolition of slavery in America. For it matters not how small the beginning may seem to be: what is once well done is done forever.” How does Dr. Shirley demonstrate this at the club where the manager refuses to bend the rules?
13. What signs do we see at the end of the film that “the dividing walls” of hostility are breaking down? In another Pauline passage (2 Cor. 5:16-20) in which the Apostle writes about reconciliation he says, “From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view…” He based this change on Christ: what is the basis of Tony’s changing his “human point of view” (of African Americans)?
14. How can friendships be crucial in racial reconciliation? And also, in moving on from the inter-personal to attacking institutional racism, i.e., changing laws and customs?
15. How is the closing Christmas Eve supper similar to Jesus’ words in Luke 13:29 (and also Matt. 24:27), “Then people will come from east and west, from north and south, and will eat in the kingdom of God”?