As the various guild and critics awards begin wrapping up for the 2019 season, Peter Farrelly’s crowd-pleasing and controversial so-called comedy, Green Book, is enjoying a meteoric rise to the coveted status of front runner for the Academy Awards’ Best Picture of the Year.
While the 2018 season began with expectations of Bradley Cooper’s A Star is Born and Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma opposed in the age-old battle of Hollywood self-infatuation vs. unmitigated cinematic craft, the minor, year-end awards voting blocs began to tell a different story. Beginning with the Golden Globes and stretching all the way through the Producers Guild of America Awards, Green Book has amassed 43 wins and counting, all before it was even nominated for five Academy Awards.
To give the film due credit, Green Book has withstood an awe-inspiring amount of criticism and controversy and scandal—the kind that would have singlehandedly derailed a prospective Best Picture win in any other year. Claims of historical inaccuracy, sexual impropriety and racism by creators have proven to cripple Academy Awards aspirations in the past.
However, the Dreamworks PR team’s near-superhuman ability to weather the critiques thrown at the film does not invalidate them. That very backlash provides a context, through which Green Book has become unwittingly emblematic of both the racism of which it thinks itself a critique and the very real sociopolitical problems facing the culture to which it submits itself for consideration. To wit, Green Book may be simultaneously the ultimate “2019” Best Picture nominee and the film least deserving to win.
The film recounts the story of Tony “Lip” Vallelonga’s (Viggo Mortensen) true-life friendship with Jamaican-American piano prodigy Dr. Donald Shirley (Mahershala Ali); after being hired to be Shirley’s chauffeur/bodyguard over the course of his musical tour through the American Deep South. Beginning its ascension in September, Green Book was awarded the Grolsch People’s Choice Award at TIFF, cementing its status as a serious Academy Awards contender (the previous winner, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri followed a similar trajectory). Both Ali and Mortensen have earned significant praise for their performances and nominations to match. Word of mouth built a sizable bubble of anticipation in advance of its Thanksgiving theatrical release and made Green Book both an instant success and contender for the biggest awards of the year.
Opening to generally favorable reviews and magnanimous audience adoration, the film was swiftly dogged by what would ordinarily have been damning accusations from the real Dr. Shirley’s surviving family. In a scathing letter of condemnation sent to various media outlets, Shirley’s brother branded the film “full of lies” and demonstrative of the unabashed white privilege of its writers (including Nick Vallelonga, Tony’s son) and director, Farrelly. Shirley’s family was famously not contacted throughout the film’s production as to how Shirley’s version of events would be recounted or his character should be played and has been largely ignored by Dreamworks’ awards campaign.
Then, on January 10th, Farrelly and Vallelonga issued separate public apologies for questionable behavior in the past. Vallelonga for an anti-Muslim tweet from 2015, and Farrelly for repeatedly exposing himself to cast and crew on the sets of his comedies—behavior that promptly ended the careers of powerful men like Harvey Weinstein and Louis C.K..
All of that sheds an important light on the film, but almost comes second to the legitimate criticisms leveled at the film’s actual content. Green Book is a film that thinks itself about the Black experience in dealing with racism in the 1960s. Its own title derives from the Green Book that Black Americans would use when traveling through the South to inform them of the establishments and locations at which they were welcome.
However, it is told by white writers, helmed by a white director and viewed through an entirely white perspective. The film is not about Shirley’s experience being discriminated against for his race and sexuality, but how Tony reacts to it. He begins the film a bigot, unwilling to even keep drinking glasses three Black laborers had used, and ends it a man who realizes that Dr. Shirley is a human being and that racism is wrong.
Both characters undergo predictable cookie-cutter realignments in how they perceive the other and come to a common ground between their upper class and working class worlds. But the story clearly belongs to Tony. He is the first character we meet in the film, it is through him we form our initial impression of Shirley, he is the only one given a goal for the end of the film and it is to him that Shirley must make the final concessions in the film’s third act. First, to be the one to drive Tony on the last leg of their journey to make it home for Christmas Eve dinner, then to admit he would rather spend the holiday with Tony and his family than alone.
The only thing truly remarkable about Green Book is its unnatural ability to make its protagonist a synecdoche of itself with an utter obliviousness in doing so. Both Lip and the overall film seem to do the absolute bare minimum to acknowledge and disapprove of the racism it subjects its costar to while never ceasing to profit off of it.
The racism it displays is a sanitized, PG-13 sampling intended to be indicative of the bigotry to which America subjected its Black citizens in the 20th Century without ever exploring its reality or consequences. The film leaves this irony unaddressed, making it so infatuated with its thesis that it lives in blissful ignorance of its own problematic nature. And anything it has to say about finding common ground and forming unlikely friendships is superseded by the privileged white voices condescendingly spouting the message.
More than anything, Green Book feels like a mediocre movie out of time. Its commentary on race relations and acceptance would feel revolutionary had it been released decades ago (especially with the similarly controversial Best Picture Winner, Driving Miss Daisy releasing in 1989). But bestowing the industry’s highest honor upon it would say more about its creators and the white audiences who digested it than the oppressed community the film postures itself to be in defense of: that the white population is only capable of understanding racism in the most explicit distinction but never in nuance.
That they are only willing to stomach it in its most sanitized and watered-down form, rather than one that is complex and layered like in BlacKkKlansman, and enjoy the luxury of leaving that racism behind when the movie is over. That racism as a storytelling tool only exists for white creators to congratulate the culture for evolving from, rather than for Black creators to tell their own stories (two of Green Book’s fellow nominees are exactly this). That “woke” white people are not interested in addressing the real problems posed by racism that are affecting lives, only in believing that recognizing them is the same as doing their part.
Farrelly’s acceptance speech for Best Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy at the Golden Globes showed neither cognizance of the hollowness inherent in his position nor intention to be anything else. In the most awkward moment of the night, he stood onstage and refused to let the band play him off, adamant on reading a speech he truly believed too important to not be heard. The message of that speech turned out to be, in the simplest terms, “don’t be racist, find common ground, people are basically the same.” Said in such a manner as though he, a white man, were a sociological pioneer for daring to speak so boldly or that were the kind of racism in modern America that needed to be addressed.
Green Book was green-lit, produced, released and nominated in one of the most politically divided periods of American history. The racism and disgust the white majority of the film has toward Dr. Shirley is not a relic of the past like the Cadillac DeVille in which Tony chauffeurs him around, it has only evolved into more subtle and diabolical forms the film could not be bothered to consider. Segregation and lynch mobs have been phased out of everyday practice. But in their place stand insurmountable systems of discrimination and intolerance.
Systems built to keep Black Americans immobilized on the economic ladder and the criminal justice system a revolving door for Black Americans denied legitimate opportunities. People of color live in perpetual wariness and distrust of the police after dozens of national stories of brutality and dishonesty. Legislative bodies target African-American communities to limit and restrict voting rights to rob them of their voices.
White nationalism and white supremacist sentiment are on a terrifying and violent rise, yet continue to be treated by the public like an infinitely small minority complaining in scattered basements and wielding no measurable power. It is a society that condemns racism with one hand and actively practices it with the other. But because 21st century racism breaks the stereotype of Civil Rights-era iconography, it goes on ignored or shoved aside under a comfortable blanket of plausible deniability it knowingly creates for itself.
This is the world in which Green Book exists. Its intentions are admirable, but it boils down to an all-too-familiar, self-congratulatory too little too late situation. Its writer and director admit to reprehensible attitude and behavior which trivialize both the discrimination the movie argues against and an industry struggling to drag itself to a state where such behavior is not tolerated. Awarding it Best Picture would be a disappointing, but unsurprising hallmark of the modern era. It would not only signal a continued lack of understanding or empathy about racism by the predominately white voting body of the film industry, but recycle the narrative of redeeming mediocre and problematic men for the sake of art or business without proper atonement or contrition.
Farrelly and Vallelonga may have apologized, but they haven’t really been made to confront or reckon with their actions or those they may have harmed. Their apologies came a month after Kevin Hart was infamously removed as host of the Oscars due to controversy from his old, homophobic tweets and four days after their Golden Globes wins. Kicking the Oscar campaign into high gear, it is impossible to know how much remorse the writer and director truly feel for their actions and words vs. how much they feel they must show to keep Green Book’s winning chances intact.
Green Book, at present, sits virtually unopposed by its seven fellow nominees in the Oscar race after taking the Darryl F. Zanuck award at the PGAs. Cinephiles and film writers now anxiously bite their nails, looking to the Directors Guild of America awards on February 2nd for hope of any other candidate to take Hollywood’s biggest prize. Alfonso Cuarón seems the best positioned to challenge Farrelly with Roma, already having won 33 awards and Best Director from critics circles and associations both international and domestic (Farrelly has thus far won zero, but earned seven nominations). But Roma’s odds of winning Best Picture are slim, and any of the other six nominees would be a monumental upset.
Every Awards season develops its own narrative of the film that wins vs. the film that should have or the probable favorite vs. the indie masterpiece. The Shape of Water’s victory left many viewers unsatisfied, admonishing the Academy’s trend of recognizing the film most in love with its own craft rather than the cultural moment achieved in films like Get Out and Lady Bird. This year would seem to buck that trend, offering no emergent “right” winner and instead recognizing the cultural moment we live in by potentially rewarding its most resilient and problematic attributes.
Good lord, the writer of this piece seriously needs to get over themselves
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