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Green Book
Feb. 9th, 2019 10:44 amLast night, we went to see Green Book. I'd heard a lot about it from different perspectives before going in so I was interested to see what I thought about it myself.
The movie depicts the true story of Anthony “Tony Lip” Vallelonga (Viggo Mortensen), an Italian-American bouncer with antiquated views on race, who was hired in 1962 by an African-American concert pianist named Dr. Don Shirley (Mahershala Ali), to drive him through the segregated South on a two-month concert tour.
The two central performances are fantastic. Mortensen truly inhabits Tony Lip, and Ali is masterful in portraying the depth of Don's emotions beneath his sophisticated exterior. And it's really funny, as well as poignant and uplifting.
The movie has been criticised both as being a "white saviour" narrative and also for Don's character being a "magical negro", a term popularised by Spike Lee to denote "a supporting stock character who comes to the aid of white protagonists in a film". And here is where I take issue with the criticism. Whilst I can see how the movie might be interpreted in these ways by some people, the fact that both accusations have been levelled against it leads to what I saw in watching it. The two characters save each other in multiple ways. And, whilst it might have been nice to see more of Don's perspective and experience, rather than the film being very firmly from Tony's point of view, Don is certainly not a stock character and his role in the story is definitely not purely to teach Tony things.
I really enjoyed the movie. I was invested in both characters and I thought the progression of their relationship from wariness and prejudice to friendship was well drawn and excellently acted. It's not an original story, and it was mostly very predictable, but I still thought it was very good overall.
The movie depicts the true story of Anthony “Tony Lip” Vallelonga (Viggo Mortensen), an Italian-American bouncer with antiquated views on race, who was hired in 1962 by an African-American concert pianist named Dr. Don Shirley (Mahershala Ali), to drive him through the segregated South on a two-month concert tour.
The two central performances are fantastic. Mortensen truly inhabits Tony Lip, and Ali is masterful in portraying the depth of Don's emotions beneath his sophisticated exterior. And it's really funny, as well as poignant and uplifting.
The movie has been criticised both as being a "white saviour" narrative and also for Don's character being a "magical negro", a term popularised by Spike Lee to denote "a supporting stock character who comes to the aid of white protagonists in a film". And here is where I take issue with the criticism. Whilst I can see how the movie might be interpreted in these ways by some people, the fact that both accusations have been levelled against it leads to what I saw in watching it. The two characters save each other in multiple ways. And, whilst it might have been nice to see more of Don's perspective and experience, rather than the film being very firmly from Tony's point of view, Don is certainly not a stock character and his role in the story is definitely not purely to teach Tony things.
I really enjoyed the movie. I was invested in both characters and I thought the progression of their relationship from wariness and prejudice to friendship was well drawn and excellently acted. It's not an original story, and it was mostly very predictable, but I still thought it was very good overall.
