I recently took in a matinee of “The Green Book” at the Levis Commons theaters and immediately settled upon my choice for the Oscar awards coming up a little later on this year. The movie is a little over two hours long but I enjoyed every minute and was a little disappointed at the end because I wanted more. I think it deserves the Best Picture award (it has been nominated) and I FEEL that the best male actor award should be split by the two stars, Viggo Mortenson and Marhershala Ali. What the hey! Director Peter Farrelly should get an Oscar too!
Okay, this effusive outburst is purely a subjective reaction to a movie that hit a sweet spot in my own personal memory. It is set in the last half of 1962 which was also a watershed time for me as well as for America. Remember the Cuban Missile Crisis? No. Of course you don’t. You’re not old enough! But I sure do because I was a fresh recruit in the U.S. Air Force just finishing up my specialty training and looking forward to an overseas assignment at the end of the year. Fortunately for me, that assignment was in Europe and not in Viet Nam, which was also just starting to heat up around that time.
However this movie stays in America and has nothing to do with our military mis-adventures overseas. It has a whole lot to do with our culture and the double-standard segregated society of that era. The story line follows a concert tour by the Don Shirley Trio during the last two months of 1962. They start in New York City and play upper crust venues in the mid-west, dropping down into the deep south and heading back up through the Atlantic states, scheduled to arrive back in NYC by Christmas.
Don Shirley was a professor of music and a very talented pianist… who happened to be black. He was affluent and well-connected and rented two new, gorgeous Cadillac sedans to convey himself and the other members of his trio on this tour. He also needed a couple of drivers. The driver selected by Prof. Shirley for himself was a tough, uneducated, Italian-American bouncer who had lived his whole life in the Bronx. Mahershala Ali plays Don Shirley and Viggo Mortenson plays his driver, Tony ‘Lip’.
I had never heard of Mahershala Ali before until I started watching the third installment of “True Detective” on HBO. Ali stars as Detective Hays in a convoluted murder-mystery that extends over decades. Frankly, I haven’t been that impressed with this outing of the franchise because it’s slow-paced and confusing with the constant jumping back & forth in time over the lives of the characters. And Ali’s portrayal of the strong, silent type who only speaks in a low, mumbling manner is also off-putting; hard to understand sometimes. However, the make-up people do an outstanding job of aging these characters!
Well, Ali’s portrayal of Don Shirley is a whole different ballgame! And my respect for Ali as an actor zooms when I compare him in the two different roles.
Speaking of different ballgames, Viggo Mortenson has certainly entered one in “The Green Book”. What happened to that young, slender, wiry, clever guy I’ve admired in action-adventures, crime-thrillers and westerns gone by? Well, he has aged into the stocky, paunchy, no-nonsense, true-blue, 40-something, tribal Italiano you see in this movie. And you gotta love him!
The Green Book of the title is an actual publication put out during that segregated era which I was unaware of … probably because I lived in the north. It listed the “appropriate” venues (hotels, restaurants, etc.) for negroes to use in the southern states as they would not be admitted to the white ones. As you can well imagine, they were NOT ‘separate but equal’.
This movie is not complicated and the progress of the journey and the developing relationship between the two main characters is pretty predictable. But it is presented – and acted – so well that I think it is Oscar-worthy.