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.