They Got Chemistry

Green Book a film by Peter Farrelly.  With Viggo Mortensen, Mahershala Ali, Linda Cardellini.  ****1/2

I understand why critics like A.O. Scott might be reluctant to praise Green Book.  It’s filled with so many racial and ethnic stereotypes that it’s almost embarrassing.  The audience is often dying to laugh but not sure they should.  When you’ve got an Italian guy trying to make a black guy eat fried chicken for the first time in his life—“Come on, your people love this food”—you can’t believe you’re watching a movie in 2018.  In a later scene the same Italian is sitting in bed and having a snack: an entire large pizza, which he folds in half and takes a massive bite out of.  Viggo Mortensen, of all people, plays this Italian; his performance is so over the top that it sometimes looks like a Saturday Night Live skit.  Whattya doin, ya bustin my balls, get outta heah.

On the other hand, the script was actually written by the son of the character that Mortensen is playing, Tony “Lip” Vallelonga, a bouncer at the Copacabana who later in life acted in The Sopranos and wrote a book called Shut Up and Eat (though in the movie he keeps talking while he eats).  Some of the cast are actual member so the Vallelonga family, playing people from the older generation.  Viggo Mortensen met Nick Vallelonga and discussed the project with him over a six-hour dinner with his family, after which he loosened his belt, sat in his car, and groaned for an hour.

If you can set aside your political correctness and just enjoy yourself, this is the feel good movie of the year.  I wasn’t really surprised by anything that happened.  But I loved watching it.

The plot is simple, and based on an actual occurrence.  In 1962, a classically trained African American pianist named Don Shirley (Mahershala Ali) decided for reasons of his own that he wanted to tour and give performances throughout the South.  Shirley as he is presented is an odd mix: he was trained to play Chopin and Brahms but has a repertoire that is more like Boston Pops; in a pinch he can get down and play blues and rock.  His bearing and diction are aristocratic in the extreme; he was born in Florida of Jamaican parents, but not only studied piano in Leningrad, he gave up music for a time and earned a doctorate in psychology before returning to a musical career.  He was fluent in eight languages.

We suspect from the start that he’s gay, and during his travels he does have one gay encounter that goes badly (he also says he was married to a woman for a while).  The contrast between this uptight and correct human being (who nevertheless insists on a bottle of Cutty Sark in his motel room every night) and the freewheeling Tony Lip (“Hey, lemme know if you need some help with that,” he says when he hears about the booze) is the contrast between night and day.

They both have something to give the other.  Tony, to say the least, is rough around the edges, and can use the refining Shirley tries to give him, and the exhortations against violence.  He especially needs help with the letters he writes back to his wife Dolores (Linda Cardellini), which Shirley turns into romantic masterpieces.  And Shirley not only needs a bodyguard, one who isn’t afraid to mix it up, he needs someone to help him live a little.  He needs to eat fried chicken and listen to Little Richard.  He needs to go to an Italian family Christmas dinner, an event which he almost missed.

The film was directed by Peter Farrelly, who is known for his road pictures—I haven’t seen the Dumb and Dumber movies—and this will be one more in that oeuvre.  One of the real pleasures of the film is the shots of the landscape as Tony drives their big-finned car (provided by Shirley’s record company) over the two-lane roads that had a lot of character in the old days, but also had their perils.  They stop in two places I’m familiar with, Pittsburgh, where I grew up, and Raleigh, NC, just a half hour from where I make my home now, and both places seem authentic.

But as much as the movie is a road trip, it’s also a food fest, from the time Tony engages in a hot dog eating contest (and supposedly puts away 26, “with toppings”) to the huge Italian Christmas dinner at the end.  I remember reading about Babe Ruth, “He always had something in his mouth,” and Tony’s the same way, eating or drinking or smoking, even as he drives, or smoking while he’s eating.  Even when he has a meeting with some mob guys at the beginning of the movie, after he puts down a draft beer in one swallow, they’re sitting there eating a huge dinner.  I felt full when the movie ended and I hadn’t eaten anything.

It does have its serious moments.  The South it presents is full of overt racism—the title refers to a book that names places where black people could stay, so they wouldn’t be humiliated by getting shut out—but it’s not especially different from the racism of Tony and his buddies in the Bronx; they can’t believe he would want to work for this guy.  Tony as the movie opens is racist in the same way.  But he changes his mind not only because of Shirley’s obvious genius, which he comes to appreciate, but also because of his humanity.  He sees first hand how the man is treated.  He endures some of that treatment himself.  They’re not chained together, as Sydny Poitier and Tony Curtis famously were in The Defiant Ones, but their fates are definitely linked.  If Shirley doesn’t show up at all his concert dates, Tony doesn’t get his pay.  And he needs the money.

This is another movie—like the recent Can You Ever Forgive Me?—that I liked much more than I expected to.  There’s a sweetness at the heart of it that cuts through all the stereotypes.  It really is—like Can You Ever Forgive Me? a two actor movie, and the genius of both movies is in the two actors they picked.  Mahershala Ali is a born aristocrat, and his excellence is no surprise.  But Viggo Mortensen as an overweight Italian goon?  Where’d they get that idea?

Whoever got it was brilliant.