One of the greatest evils of society certainly is racism. From the arrival of black Africans for slavery in the Americas, racial prejudice resists until today. In the United States, for an example, the abolition of slavery has brought a very strong exclusion of black people in society, especially in the Southern states.
Since the 19th century, racial segregation was legal in the United States, which meant that there was a separation of various public and private services according to race, something that lasted until the end of the 60’s. With establishments refusing to receive black people, mainly in the south of the country, it was written The Black Motorist Green Book, a guide for black travelers that listed places that accepted black people in their dependencies. The guide, created by a black New Yorker postman named Victor Hugo Green, was the one that originated the Green Book movie.
One of the most talked-about films during the awards season, Green Book has five Oscar nominations and was one of the big winners of this year’s Golden Globe, taking three awards home: Best Comedy or Musical Film, Best Screenplay and Best Supporting Actor (Mahershala Ali). The film was also the winner of the Toronto Festival in 2018.
Image Source: IMDb
Peter Farrelly’s Green Book is able to consciously and accurately portray racism in the United States without making a dense and tense plot. The film bears the tale of Tony Lip (Viggo Mortensen), a buck from New York who needs to work after Copacabana, the nightclub where he was a waiter, closed the doors. One day, he is called for a job interview to be a doctor’s driver. But when he arrives at the interview, he discovers that in fact the job would be to be a driver of a famous black pianist, Doctor Don Shirley (Mahershala Ali), for two months on a tour in the South of the United States. Even with some resistance, Lip accepts the job for the money to help his family. During the trip, the two begin to get to know each other better and understand each other’s social situation.
Based on a true story, the criticism is incisive in portraying a certain irony for the time: the white Italian is the middle class who works for the black cult high society’s guy .Because they are real facts, the story is more surprising, since it presents a true lesson for the time. Tony was an American family father who, whether he wanted to or not, was racist. In one of the first scenes, when two black men are fixing their kitchen, his wife serves two glasses of water. When they leave, the man throws the glass cups in the trash because they have been used by the black people. Even so, he embarks on the journey of driving a black man for two months, and as he approaches to him, he realizes how hard the reality of racial segregation is.
But the lesson comes from both sides: Doctor Shirley was a “point outside the curb”. With money and worship, he found himself in a purgatory: “he is not too white or too black.” Because he had more opportunity, he didn’t know his so-called roots and was eventually excluded from the black community. But on the other hand, even with formal education and an extensive standard cultural knowledge, Don was not accepted by the white elite because of his skin. That is, not even the money and the repertoire were above the race in this situation.
Image Source: IMDb
Without losing hands in the critique of racism, the film brings laughter at the right moments, making the plot lighter and more real. In one of the thousands conversations of the pair in the car – almost a monologue since Tony spoked by the elbows – the driver buys a fried chicken on the road and offers the pianist for being something that “his people always eat”, saying that since he is black, he should like it because it should be a “typical” black food. But Don had never eaten roast chicken, and the scene becomes comical when he learns how to eat junk food.
Green Book is a film that shows how the relationship between two people of different races and opposite classes can be possible even with the racist society of the time. When Tony was distant from the reality of black people, he created preconceptions like music style and “native” food. But as he approaches the racist reality that black people have to live on, he can understand the real gravity of this behavior. The film has everything to win several awards and is my bet for Best Film for the Oscars.