Or more importantly, the way that one of them kind of doesn't. Green Book is book-ended by scenes that imply Tony Lip (and somehow his family, possibly via telepathy) has grown as a person during his time with Dr. Shirley, but the movie in between those scenes in no way challenges Tony's worldview or the way he acts – in fact, it validates and agrees with him almost unanimously, possibly because it was written by Tony's real life son, Nick Vallelonga, who naturally wouldn't want to portray his father in a bad light. Instead, it is Dr. Shirley's worldview that is challenged throughout, often on the receiving end of what can only be described as Tony's "white working class wisdom". Over the course of the movie, we see Dr. Shirley go from someone who doesn't respect or appreciate Tony to someone who does – which means that Green Book is, at a fundamental level, a film about a black man learning not to judge a white guy based on appearances.
That's pretty incomprehensible for a film set in the midst of the Civil Rights movement in the Jim Crow South to do, especially when Dr. Shirley's real life family dispute many of the claims made by Green Book, right down to the idea that Tony and Dr. Shirley were ever even friends. This is a film that seems to broadly agree with Tony when he says that he's blacker than Dr. Shirley, who at this point in the movie has been harassed and assaulted multiple times for being black, a film in which Tony helps Dr. Shirley get back in touch with his blackness by forcing him to eat fried chicken. In the years to come, we're going to look back at Green Book and laugh about the fact that it was ever considered a serious movie, let alone a best picture award winner – it's simply an incredibly tone deaf and stupid movie, offering a childish and mollycoddled take on a topic that deserves a far more intelligent and confrontational examination than Green Book is willing (or able, I suspect) to offer.
And yet I'd be lying if I tried to claim that Green Book wasn't at the very least watchable, reasonably well put together on a technical level with nice cinematography and good editing even while it sticks its foot so far into its mouth that it can taste its own kneecaps. Mortensen's Frank Vallelonga is a caricature of an Italian-American but it's exactly what this movie needs, a performance big enough and bizarre enough to keep you engaged where a more subtle performance simply wouldn't. Is it a good performance, of a well-written character? No. But it works within the context that Green Book presents it, much like the rest of the movie tapping into well-worn tropes to produce something so familiar that it can't help but end up feeling... well, comforting, and safe, and broadly inoffensive - as long as it's playing to "the right kind of audience", which just so happens to be the same demographic as the majority of Academy Award voters.
Green Book is little more than a shallow and superficial example of why the recognisable hallmarks of a prestige picture don't mean much at all if they aren't imprinted on something with actual merit, which really shouldn't have come as much of a surprise being as it's directed by one of the guys behind the excruciating Movie 43. With another writer and a different director, maybe Green Book could've been a genuinely good, enlightening movie. But as it stands, it's little more than a film that's only vaguely entertaining at its very best, deeply unchallenging and staggeringly misguided throughout - and if that's what we're holding up as the best picture of 2018, then something has gone very wrong indeed.
That's pretty incomprehensible for a film set in the midst of the Civil Rights movement in the Jim Crow South to do, especially when Dr. Shirley's real life family dispute many of the claims made by Green Book, right down to the idea that Tony and Dr. Shirley were ever even friends. This is a film that seems to broadly agree with Tony when he says that he's blacker than Dr. Shirley, who at this point in the movie has been harassed and assaulted multiple times for being black, a film in which Tony helps Dr. Shirley get back in touch with his blackness by forcing him to eat fried chicken. In the years to come, we're going to look back at Green Book and laugh about the fact that it was ever considered a serious movie, let alone a best picture award winner – it's simply an incredibly tone deaf and stupid movie, offering a childish and mollycoddled take on a topic that deserves a far more intelligent and confrontational examination than Green Book is willing (or able, I suspect) to offer.
And yet I'd be lying if I tried to claim that Green Book wasn't at the very least watchable, reasonably well put together on a technical level with nice cinematography and good editing even while it sticks its foot so far into its mouth that it can taste its own kneecaps. Mortensen's Frank Vallelonga is a caricature of an Italian-American but it's exactly what this movie needs, a performance big enough and bizarre enough to keep you engaged where a more subtle performance simply wouldn't. Is it a good performance, of a well-written character? No. But it works within the context that Green Book presents it, much like the rest of the movie tapping into well-worn tropes to produce something so familiar that it can't help but end up feeling... well, comforting, and safe, and broadly inoffensive - as long as it's playing to "the right kind of audience", which just so happens to be the same demographic as the majority of Academy Award voters.
Green Book is little more than a shallow and superficial example of why the recognisable hallmarks of a prestige picture don't mean much at all if they aren't imprinted on something with actual merit, which really shouldn't have come as much of a surprise being as it's directed by one of the guys behind the excruciating Movie 43. With another writer and a different director, maybe Green Book could've been a genuinely good, enlightening movie. But as it stands, it's little more than a film that's only vaguely entertaining at its very best, deeply unchallenging and staggeringly misguided throughout - and if that's what we're holding up as the best picture of 2018, then something has gone very wrong indeed.
No comments:
Post a Comment