Green Book review: Viggo Mortensen and Mahershala Ali give this civil rights fairy tale a lift

Dir: Peter Farrelly; Starring: Viggo Mortensen, Mahershala Ali, Linda Cardellini, Dimeter Marinov, Mike Hatton, Iqbal Theba. Cert 12A, 130 mins

If there were Oscars for eating hot dogs, Viggo Mortensen would win this year’s award hands down (and mouth stuffed). Mortensen gives a wonderful, method-style performance as Frank “Tony Lip” Vallelonga, a wiseguy nightclub bouncer from the Bronx who becomes the driver for black virtuoso pianist Don Shriley (Mahershala Ali) on a tour of the deep south in the early Sixties.

Green Book flatters the audience about its own good sense and tolerance. It deals with racism and homophobia but still has a fairytale, fantasy feel to it. Whatever humiliations Don endures on their road trip, we know no real harm will ever come to him as long as Tony is at his side. This is a film about friendship as much as it is about civil rights. We can also safely predict that the pair’s better qualities will rub off on each other: Tony will overcome his prejudices while Don will learn not to be quite such a cultural snob.

Mortensen plays Tony as a hedonistic, impulsive brawler. He is a likeable everyman in spite of his prejudices, but he is also an opportunist who will do anything for a buck. His temperament could not be more different to that of his new boss, the refined and aloof classically-trained musician. Don – nicknamed “the doctor” – is very fussy, very particular. “He plays like Liberace but better,” it is said of him at one stage.

Mortensen is the Sancho Panza figure to the very refined Don Quixote type played beautifully by Ali. And they make quite a double act, providing an emotional charge to a film that might otherwise have seemed trite and manipulative.

The film is crude and delicate by turns. Farrelly is known for the often very broad comedies like There’s Something About Mary and Dumb and Dumber he directs with his brother, Bobby. Some of the gags and visual observations here could come from such works. For example, early on, in order to show the audience that Tony is an unreconstructed racist, there is a long drawn-out scene in which he picks up water glasses that black repairmen have drunk out of as if they are contaminated and drops them in the garbage.

Tony and Ali head off from New York on an epic road trip with the rest of Ali’s band following in the car behind. In the course of the journey, Tony marvels at “nature” and pines for his wife. Don dictates the fulsome, heartfelt letters he writes to her. The pianist also gives his driver tips on diction, etiquette and provides Sunday school-style lectures on why stealing is wrong.

The film’s title comes from a handbook for African-American drivers, telling them just what to do to stay out of trouble in the Jim Crow south. Don gives Tony a copy – and so the white, Italian-American gets a taste of the black motorist’s experience.

The film is full of reversals and ironies like this. Again and again during the journey, each man’s preconceptions are challenged. The further south they head, the more prejudice they encounter. Don’s musical virtuosity is generally applauded by the white spectators but that doesn’t mean he is allowed to use the same bathrooms or stay in the same motels.

Don is an elegant, cerebral figure, steeped in classical music but unaware of the Aretha Franklin and James Brown, music that his driver cherishes. He drinks a specific brand of whisky, and won’t play on anything other than a Steinway. While he sits in the back, Tony is at the wheel, grease from his fried food running down his chin, chattering away. “You people love fried chicken,” he tells his boss in one of the casually racist remarks he makes throughout the first part of the film – but he is the one who eats such food. Indeed, there is barely a scene in the film in which he isn’t devouring chicken wings or sausages or whatever other convenience food is available.

There are some strange digressions and inconsistencies in characterisation, however. For all his meticulousness, Don acts in very erratic fashion. He gets drunk, and his sexual escapades land him in jail. He may be perceptive enough about relationships to know just what Tony should write to his wife but he is a loner who doesn’t have a partner of his own. There is a masochistic fatalism to him that the film touches on but doesn’t want to explore too deeply.

Don embarks on the tour out of defiance: he wants to confront southern racism head on. He shows courage and heroic restraint in the way he deals with his white hosts. But at the same time, he is painfully naïve, and when it comes to street smarts, Tony is the virtuoso. He knows how to face down thugs in a bar.

Green Book is based on a true story but has clearly taken considerable liberties with its source material. It eventually turns into a full-blown Christmas movie, with all the usual trimmings. The doc’s one-man campaign for racial equality is forgotten as the two men make their epic journey back north, and the film begins to turn as mushy as the winter weather they encounter en route. The underlying message here is similar to that in Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life in which we learn “no man is a failure who has friends”. There is room at the Christmas table for everyone.

The sugarcoating is very thick. It doesn’t matter, though. Ali and Mortensen make a tremendously engaging odd couple. Both give such nuanced and well-observed performances that most audiences will swallow the sentimental moralising as easily as Tony digests his hot dogs.