FILM: Green Book

The film Green Book is named for the Negro Motorist Green Book, a publication something like a special Auto Club guide for black people that allowed them to travel safely across America during the Jim Crow years. (Gay people my generation and older will be familiar with the concept from Damron or Spartacus Guide books.) Those of us lucky enough never to have suffered Jim Crow laws may not have thought about the pragmatic burdens for people of color making road trips in that era, finding a place to stay, or eat, or whole towns best to avoid. This film shows us all of that in uncomfortable detail, but in the course of a very engaging road trip story with two intriguing characters. Dr. Don Shirley (superbly portrayed by Mahershala Ali), a black man, is a renowned concert pianist with exquisite diction in multiple languages and a rather affected manner. Tony Vallelonga (perfectly embodied by Viggo Mortensen) is an Italian-American night club bouncer who gets hired by Dr. Shirley to be his driver and bodyguard on a concert tour across the Midwest and South in 1962. What transpires between those two in the course of that trip is an education for them both, and a fascinating story to watch. It’s a great reminder as a nation of where we have come from, a prompt for thinking of present struggles we still need to work through, and an inspiration for how that progress is slowly won through personal interactions across our divides.