Review of Green Book (2018) by Hotelcentral — 16 May 2019

Probably the best I can say about Green Book is "It's a nice story.".

The problem of course is that the film says nothing much about the sixties, racism, and the South that I haven't heard before and frankly this version of the racist South is portrayed as being far less ugly than the South deserves. The Klan doesn't even put in an appearance. And this story is supposed to have taken place at the same time when white civil rights activists from the North were being hunted down, murdered, and buried in shallow graves, and black people generally were being lynched, bombed, and burned out of their homes, in many cases with the collaboration of so-called "law enforcement.".

A lot is being made of the fact that it's a tough Italian-American from Brooklyn who signs on with an African-American. And, yeah, that's a little bit amazing. The film however does not do anything much to convince me that the character "Tony Lip" would actually sign on to work with a black man. The film makes it clear that just the idea of black workmen using the same drink glasses his family uses is too much to bear, (Tony drops the glasses in the garbage), but it doesn't do anything to show me that such a man is capable of putting his feelings aside for the sake of a paycheck, especially when there seems to be plenty of Italian-Americans around willing to provide Tony with work.

So, yeah, it's a nice film, but it doesn't really do a great job of showing the South as it was, or how it is to this very day, in places.