Green Book True Story, Summary, Reviews, Ratings and Cast

Green Book [2018] Full HD Movie Download
 

Do American audiences still want a movie like Green Book? To many, the answer seemed obvious back in September, when, following its premiere at the Toronto Film Festival, Peter Farrelly’s odd-couple seriocomedy won the Audience Award and was deemed an Oscar front-runner by the small set of prognosticators who are now the first line of assessment when it comes to fall contenders. The fact-based story, about Dr. Don Shirley (Mahershala Ali), a black pianist, and his white driver Tony “Lip” Vallelonga (60-year-old Viggo Mortensen, an odd fit for a character who was 32 at the time) bonding on a southern concert tour in the racist South of 1962, offered life lessons, learning arcs, feel-good moments, and a happy ending. It might not charm all critics, the early thinking went, but it was clearly going to be a crowd-pleaser.

So Green Book isn’t merely inspired by history, we’re told, or based on a true story:it is the “true story,” written by family, and furthermore, it depicts a “true friendship.” Certainly there are nuggets of historical reality to acknowledge here: Tony Lip really was an Italian-American bouncer from Paramus, New Jersey, who worked the Copacabana before being hired to escort Dr. Shirley on a tour of the South. Dr. Shirley, meanwhile, really was a concert and jazz pianist—an outright prodigy, who, as the movie depicts, lived with regal splendor in an apartment above Carnegie Hall. That 1962 road trip undergone by the two men? That really happened too, though it lasts about two months in the film while, in real life, it lasted about a year. Importantly, the two mens’ friendship is said to have lasted until they died four months apart in 2013.

Mortensen, with a pot belly and a Bronx accent, disappears gleefully into his role as a soft-hearted slob. He makes Tony so warm and fun to watch – look at him fold an entire large pizza in half and eat it like a sandwich – that it’s easy to overlook the fact that the character is one more fast-talking Italian-American stereotype. He’s a small-time scammer, tough on the outside, yet a family man to his core, with a pasta-eating dinner table full of relatives and a patient wife (Linda Cardellini), who is smarter than he is.

It should be no wonder, then, that Mortensen had a decisive leg up when it came to fleshing out his character. “I brought [Mortensen] in to my family, and he hung out with us,” Vallelonga told Screen Rant. “We ate at my brother’s house. We ate at my uncle’s house. . . . He had the audio tapes of my father, video of my father.” Linda Cardellini, who plays Dolores Vallelonga—Tony Lip’s wife and Nick Vallelonga’s mother—was decked out in her character’s actual jewelry, including her wedding band.

In an early scene, Tony also reveals himself to be an unthinking racist, setting up the problem the film will, of course, resolve. After two black workmen leave his kitchen, he picks up the water glasses they have drunk from and tosses them into the bin. Green Book is at times as unaware as Tony, stumbling into the stereotypes it is supposedly trying to break down.

Another movie might have explored Don’s costumed hauteur from within, understanding it as a defense, a calculation, even a performance. (The real Shirley was also a psychologist, a fact about which Green Book expresses virtually no interest.) But this film uses his remoteness geometrically; it’s one point on a triangle, exactly as far from the apex that represents a warm and human ideal as the other point — Tony’s unregenerate coarseness and frank racism — is. Green Book sometimes feels less imagined than measured with a protractor. Tony needs to stop referring to black people as “jungle bunnies,” but also Don needs to stop saying highfalutin things like, “It is my feeling that your diction, however charming it may be in the tristate area, could use some finessing.” Tony needs to broaden his horizons and learn how to write his wife a nice letter (he ends up taking dictation, Cyrano-style, from Don, who naturally has nobody to write nice letters to), but also Don needs to learn to enjoy fried chicken and Aretha Franklin and be more comfortable in his skin. Tony needs to grow up (because racism is, in movies like Green Book, primarily a sign of immaturity), but also Don needs to loosen up; he’s so constricted that he owns a chess set with only white pieces! Tony needs to get a little smarter, but also Don is too smart, like Obama was. “It don’t look fun to be that smart,” Tony — so unrefined yet so observant about deeper truths! — writes home. (Don didn’t need to help him with that sentence.)

As depicted in Farrelly’s film, though, Shirley also feels alienated from his own blackness, and from other black people—perhaps thanks to the mostly white audience his immense talents have earned him, or perhaps because of his sexuality (he is, we discover, a gay man), or maybe because of his relative class privilege compared to the Southern blacks we see throughout Green Book. He is, we’re told, completely divorced from his own family: a lonely, isolated genius, and an alcoholic to boot. When staying at a black-friendly motel, he holds himself apart from other blacks, wearing his fine clothing and turning up his nose. It isn’t until an Italian guy with a Bronx accent practically shoves it into his mouth that he eats fried chicken for the first time (another incident Vallelonga says happened in real life as it does in the movie).

But even Mahershala Ali can only do so much with a film in which Tony assumes that Shirley loves fried chicken, then after learning that the stereotype doesn’t apply, teaches him to appreciate fried chicken after all. Why shatter a stereotype if you’re just going to put it together again?

Director Peter Farrelly has made broad comedies with his brother, including the perfectly named Dumb and Dumber and Something About Mary. Working on his own here, he doesn’t veer far from that formula, opting for obvious comedy at every turn. The film heads inevitably toward a moment of brotherhood between two men who must have seemed unlikely friends in life, and are all too likely on screen.    

The character Mortensen plays in Green Book takes that same journey, in that familiar way. (Accordingly, Mortensen is being given a Best Actor campaign, while his co-star Ali, whose job in the film is to assist him in his evolution while benefiting from his salt-of-the-earth common sense, will be pushed for Supporting Actor.) Tony learns to stop being a racist by two means that haven’t changed a bit in the decades since In the Heat of the Night set them up: He decides to make an exception for someone exceptional (Don’s talent as a musician helps the scales fall from his eyes), and once he does so, he learns to feel revulsion at, you know, the bad kind of racist — the kind that won’t sell you a suit or that makes you use an outhouse or that wants to beat you to death. And he proves himself capable of change by pulling the delicate, almost alien creature in his charge out of one jam after another, becoming the film’s white (and, in a notably under-explored twist, straight) savior.