Green Book is a warm and entertaining Hollywood melodrama that tells an uplifting story despite focusing on some very upsetting racial discrimination, but what’s likely even more upsetting, is how the themes that this film touches upon are still hyper relevant today, despite the narrative being set in the early 1960’s. Viggo Mortensen and Mahershala Ali are both fantastic and share wonderful on-screen chemistry with one another, and it’s rather amazing to see comedy legend Peter Farrelly direct something so straight-ahead and dramatic; nothing in his career as a big-screen purveyor of laughs could have signaled that he was headed into this type of storytelling.
He shows a very smooth directorial hand, as the film was finessed in every department (Sean Porter’s casually elegant cinematography is a standout production element), and the witty script that Farrelly co-wrote with Nick Vallelonga and Brian Hayes Currie hits all of the proper notes of self-introspection and societal observance and messaging. I’m surprised that this movie, which so triumphantly speaks to the notion that positive change is possible within human beings, hasn’t become a bigger hit at the box-office. It’s the sort of movie that audiences should have embraced as a family.
This film dares to “go there” and entertain the possibility that a rough-around-the-edges Italian-American man could learn something from an erudite and worldly African-American man during a very turbulent time in history, and vice-versa. And it also hinges on the idea that their strengths and limitations as people helped them to form a better understanding of humanity in general. A film with a message this positive is greater than the sum of its parts and should be celebrated in our currently divided and rather ugly country.
Review by Nick Clement
Summary
One thing’s for certain – Green Book contains all of the proper ingredients for Oscar success. I really enjoyed this movie and would happily screen it again.
