Review of Green Book (2018) by Hnestlyonthesly — 07 Oct 2019

This movie is poison. Its main problem is while its story deadens your soul, you feel good watching, because Mahershala Ali and Viggo Mortensen have such electric chemistry. As Wife puts it, the film posits that racism is something that an eight week road trip can resolve.

The geographic chronology of this film suggests that the country becomes more racist the farther south you go, when what is clear to anyone in the know, is that racist institutions exist in large and subtle ways in every corner of the country. Wife says that Dr Shirley addresses that point after the bar scene when he asks Tony if it would’ve gone any different at a bar in his neighborhood in New York, but it’s clear that otherwise confusingly banal scenes of #notallwhitecops helping Tony and Shirley on their ride home in the snow are meant to signal something unnecessary and facile about the forces of inclusion and progressivism in the country. Seth Stephens-Davidowitz’s book Everybody Lies talks about how Big Data show racial animosity is not a North-South divide so much as an East-West of the Mississippi divide (if memory serves).

There’s a fair bit of soap-boxing, self-congratulatory progressive liberalism, back-dated to 1962–what Wife called the “simpering” morality of one of Dr Shirley’s musician friends who eulogizes his “bravery”. The deepest the two ever get in discussing racial politics is during a fight toward the end of the film, when Tony accuses Shirley of not being black enough, which triggers a powerful cut scene back to the trailer that brought audiences in the first place, but doesn’t push the ball much further down the field. Dr Shirley calls Tony a moron again and they wisely agree to disagree, rather than dragging themselves into a nasty discussion about institutional racism and white privilege. There are a lot of straw man arguments that the script, in part written by family of the protagonists, sets up to avoid any real reckoning with racism, and they’ve been more thoughtfully lampooned everywhere months ago.

Most interesting thing I thought Wife said about this film was that it was missing a Winter Sequence. There weren’t really any stakes to the film, no conflict to prompt action, change, or growth from our main characters. The lack of a winter sequence is what makes the film a feel-good film, but that also sucks the air out of the script and makes it feel a little brain dead.

Every good actor is allotted a certain number of bad movies. There’s nothing wrong with this story being told, necessarily. It’s just not that it’s an especially insightful or needed story and it might actually be kind of actively hostile to the goals it seems like it’s striving towards.