Green Book - great actors, moralising-by-numbers

How simplistic do you like your race relations?  Well if you like it predictable, Green Book is your film.  Green Book tells the semi-real story of how semi-racist Tony Lip (Viggo Mortensen) takes a job driving Don Shirley (Mahershala Ali) around the Southern US states, partly cos he needed a driver, but mostly because he needed someone hard-as-nails who could get him out of the almost inevitable strife that being a black man in Alabama in the 1960s would generate.  Tony needs to be home for Xmas.  Don needs to play his final gig in Birmingham Alabama on December 23rd.  Go ahead and try to write the script.  How do you think it'll end?  Seriously have a go - you'll probably get it right.

Which is one of a number of reasons why Green Book doesn't quite work as well as I imagine the production team would have hoped.  Aside from the linearity and predictability of the plot, the film hits every beat you would expect it to.  Tony Lip is a racist, he interacts with a bunch of black people and learns not to be.  Shirley feels like an outcast, he experiences the simple pleasures of 1960s Americana and learns not to be.  Nothing wrong with this, but for a film that was billed for its relevance in an age of Black Lives Matter, it's not really good enough.  Additionally, Tony Lip is a little too racist at the start of the film.  I wasn't around in the 1960s, but this film was made in 2018 and it is something of a stretch to believe a man who would throw away glasses black workmen drank out of will a few months later invite a black man into his house for Xmas.  Or was casual I'm-not-racist-but racism in the 1960s really like that?  Am I really that naive?

Green Book won a series of awards at the Oscars, and one of course wonders how much of this was influenced by the now annual accusation that the ceremony is 'so white'.  What better way to demonstrate inclusivity than dish out the awards to the film that does 'race' relations, the film in which the misguided-but-lovable white guy from New York realises not to be a racist?  Don't get me wrong, Mahershala Ali deserved the award, but best film Green Book isn't.  BlacKkKlansman is a better film and speaks in a much deeper way about the black experience in the USA; at least it got the best screenplay award.

In watching the film I was reminded of the Simpsons episode where Homer struggles to cope with new guy in town - John - who is gay.  The episode ends with Homer finally accepting John for who he is after John saves Homer's life.  John quips "I won your respect; and all I had to do was save your life.  Now if only every gay man could do that - you'd be set.".  Homer reacts: "Amen to that". In two lines The Simpsons in 1997 was far more cutting in critiquing society's demand that people justify themselves for their differences than this film is over a full 2 hours.

All of this is not to say that Green Book isn't a good watch.  Ali and Mortensen are great actors, and it's worth one's time to see them riff off each other for an hour.  Just don't expect to feel all warm and fuzzy about the US at the end of it.

The Searchers - Westerns not my thing I guess

Writing this in April 2020 - the age of lock-down - it seems completely natural that I would get back to my film-watching roots and watch all of the films.  Got enough time for it whatever else is happening in the world.  Hunting around for film genres I'm not even slightly abreast of usually involves getting very obscure these days, however there is one major genre I never really got into.  Or understood.  Or watched.

The Western is a genre that seems to have arisen out of a very specific set of circumstances surrounding the creation of the nation state that is the USA.  The pioneers that created that nation are lauded; be they religious extremists from Western Europe settling on the Eastern seaboard or astronauts setting foot on the moon, in amongst them are the intrepid explorers who set off over the Appalachian mountains to colonise a land already occupied by more people than some versions of history want us to remember.  They took weapons with them into a hostile land, and so the USA's 2nd amendment was born.  They colonised a land of considerable mineral wealth and gave the modern USA a backyard of endless resources with which to build a superpower.  And hence the Western was born of a lionisation of those individuals.  Their crimes against native peoples were brushed over.  The hardships endured were recast as a forging of a nation.

Hence The Searchers.  If you hunt around for not very long at all on the internet you'll be told by more than one source that The Searcher is one of the greatest Westerns ever made - if not the greatest.

Hmmm...

Watching The Searchers is an odd experience.  Like any art created in a different era, it is always important to understand its contemporary impact.  From a modern standpoint The Searchers is racist, and The Searchers is sexist.  It is hard to understand how that could have been different in a 1950s setting.  America was a very different place, but it is hard to understand how anyone could see any good in the character portrayed by John Wayne - Ethan Edwards.  Edwards is a veteran of war and returns to his family shortly before local Comanches attack their residence and kill his brother's family, kidnapping his niece.  Edwards then spends the next several years hunting down the kidnappers, more out of rage and revenge than any real desire to save her.  In fact Edwards even resolves to kill her if she has gone 'too far' and turned Comanche.  Better to be dead than a Comanche.  Is this what happens in Westerns?

And so it is that we follow Edwards and several companions trailing the Comanche.  Occasionally they chance upon a bar and ask questions, one time they arrive back at the ranch and Edwards' companion tries to reignite a romance, at the end they turn up at her wedding and start a fight for some reason to prove some point of idiotic masculinity.  If the film is a critique of Westerns, it isn't strong enough.  If the film is celebrating individuals like Edwards, then it's zigzagging tone makes it feel extremely unsure of itself.  The female characters do nothing except wait for the men folk to turn up and save / marry them.  The Comanche characters do nothing except growl and shoot guns.  The male characters do nothing but look bedraggled and gaze hopelessly towards the horizon.  The film is at best a loose critique of a world thankfully behind us, and at worst it is a shameful document reminding us that world isn't as far behind us as we'd wish.  Or maybe Westerns just aren't for me.  Probably wont be watching any more John Wayne films - not unless the lock-down goes on for a loooong time...