Although it saw its initial theatrical release in mid-November of 2018, the Best Picture winner of the 2019 Academy Awards, Green Book is just now showing at the Movies 8 in Paris.
Starring Viggo Mortensen as a Copacabana wiseguy, and Mahershala Ali as an enigmatic piano genius, the road trip buddy drama has something to say about family and culture in 1950’s America that still resonates today.
In search of a new job after a confrontation as a night club bouncer, Viggo Mortensen’s character Tony becomes the driver to Mahershala Ali’s Dr. Don Shirley as he takes his classical jazz trio through a concert tour of the Deep South.
Inspired by a true story, the two polar opposite personalities clash at first as they spend hours driving together. Tony, the lackadaisical ruffian, incensed by the prim and proper elementts of society helps Dr. Shirley loosen up and Don, in turn, helps him to better understand and appreciate the finer things in life that he never really paid attention to. The two share laughs and grow in their characters’ arcs by the movie’s end.
The way their characters develop, against the backdrop of a Jim Crow South, is the real crux of the film and what has earned it such praise from critics.
Tony, who is portrayed as being latently discriminatory at the beginning of the film, finds himself, as per his job title, physically rescuing Dr. Shirley from violence and certain unjust imprisonment at the hands of the proprietors of a 1950’s legal system, and its blatantly prejudicial practices. In turn, Don explains to Tony, in an effectively revelatory scene in the rain, how difficult it is to find one’s place in a society that so stringently applies tribal categories to one’s personhood.
The movie engages the heavily charged and unbalanced relationship America has had with race since its founding, through the lives of these two characters as a kind of catharsis for the audience. It tackles the loneliness of such a society when Tony’s character says in a particularly emotional scene, “The world’s full of lonely people afraid to make the first move.”
By movie’s end, walls are torn down, barriers are broken, and the healing that such a burden forces its bearers to pursue is accomplished, even if in a small way.
Mahershala Ali’s acting earned Best Supporting Actor along with the film’s Screenplay earning a 2019 Oscar. Viggo Mortensen is funny in his role as the wisecracking wiseguy and plays seamlessly into the story’s plotline.
The film knows what it wants to say and is very clear and precise in its production. That even though the world outside may be chaotic, individuals have the freedom to make good choices that reflect healthy relationships in each other’s lives and that, cinematically, is always heartening.
