Green Book

A film set in America in 1962 and based on a real journey. Tony is a bouncer at a nightclub in New York. When the club closes he is out of work and is called to an interview. The employer is a pianist. Don Shirley is classically trained, very good, and is going south for a tour of two months; he needs a driver and protection. Tony is racist. At the start of the film he throws away the glasses used by two men working in his house. From there the film is a road story. Concert halls, motels, petrol stations, and a south that keeps hardening. The book gives the film its title. In those years there was a guide showing Black drivers which hotels and restaurants they could enter, and it is used throughout the journey. What the narrative is interested in is not racism but class and solitude: Shirley is outside both the white world and the Black one, and says so once, plainly, in the rain. The concert line is the matter itself. The man applauded in the evening cannot use the hall's lavatory. The tone is mostly comic, which is the film's most criticised feature. The narrative focuses on the white character's learning, and Shirley's family criticised its account of events. The film won three Academy Awards: Best Picture, Supporting Actor and Original Screenplay. One of the writers is Tony's son. Viggo Mortensen, Mahershala Ali and Linda Cardellini are in the cast. Peter Farrelly directed. Who it is for: anyone who wants a warm two-hander told in the classical manner. Who it is not for: anyone expecting the subject taken seriously; the narrative deliberately declines to be uncomfortable.