The Contenders: GREEN BOOK

There are three films nominated for Best Picture this Sunday that don’t just leave me scratching my head – they leave me shaking it. Three films that feel so messy, so toothless, so ill-conceived and/or poorly executed that I wonder how they ever became hits…let alone became Best Picture nominees.

BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY is one, VICE is two. Today, I begrudgingly arrive at the third.

GREEN BOOK is a movie based on a true story. It details a concert tour by Doc Shirley (Mahershala Ali) across the American midwest and deep south. To pull this off, he needs a driver, and that’s where Frank “Tony Lip” Vallelonga comes in. Frank acts as his driver and valet, and the two spark an uneasy friendship on the road.

It’s America in the early 1960’s. Doc is black and Frank is white. It’s all supposed to make us feel better about the state of race relations…and if you squint really hard, I suppose it can.

I say “I suppose” because GREEN BOOK plays like the sort of movie Hollywood used to make in hopes of inspiring greater racial tolerance. You’ll hear people compare it to CRASH, or DRIVING MISS DAISY – and they’re not wrong. Both of those movies took a facile approach to a complicated story, and that’s very much what GREEN BOOK does too. It checks the boxes, paints by the numbers, and uses every other metaphor you can think of as it pleads with us to all get along.

GREEN BOOK is handsome in the way that almost every story set in 1960’s America is handsome. Mahershala Ali is deeply engaging…because he’s just too damned talented not to be deeply engaging. That’s about all the praise I can lob at this movie, and yet I get the nagging suspicion that Oscar is about ready to lob more praise at this movie.

Despite the film being made by a man who made his bones making gross-out comedies, that man thinking that exposing himself for laughs is a good idea, and that man telling a story that is deeply in-dispute…GREEN BOOK landed itself five Oscar nominations, including Best Picture.

It’s hard to believe this film is a contender in a year when so many more worthy and more nuanced films about Black America were overlooked. It’s also setting the stage for a freakishly safe movie to take Oscar’s top prize in a year when so many more complicated films were cast aside.

This is the sort of movie your parents will like (I don’t car how young or old your parents are – this movie is for them). I’m not above making movies your parents will like, but I am above lauding them as some of the best films of the year. What’s more, by the sounds of it Doc Shirley was a talented, multifaceted, and intriguing person.

Now his story is unlikely to be given its due, because what filmmaker wants to try to follow the Oscar nominee? That’s the real shame of this nomination, and any potential wins that come from it; the story of Doc Shirley will never be properly told on-screen…all because the son of Frank Vallelonga decided to tell it first.