Film, tv & radio – 22. jan. 2019 – at. 14:53 Viggo Mortensen can run with the world’s largest film prize
It is fairly easy to fob off the ‘Green Book’ as a leflende and predictable feel-good film, which is constantly press all the right buttons, so all of those on the back row can also be with. But maybe this is the predictability part of the point: That if you learn to know each other better, so it’s really hard to maintain the prejudices. And it is probably also fully aware that you want to spread the movie’s anti-racist message out to as large an audience as possible instead of just preaching to the already convinced.
It must not hear an evil word here. Not least because the ‘Green Book’ actually works, if you go with its populist terms. And so it is based also on a true story.
Intl. known – 27. dec. 2018 – at. 12:44 Viggo Mortensen admits: Struggling with kiloene
We write in 1962, and the eccentric and rarefied african-american virtuoso pianist, Dr. Donald Shirley must koncerturné in the southern states with his trio. He is well aware that it can cause some problems, so he hired the burly and smaskende doorman Tony Lip (Viggo Mortensen) as a combination of driver and bodyguard. That we already early in the film in a telling scene, have seen that Tony with the Italian roots – he is taken out of the ‘Sopranos’ – even have racist tendencies, is a not unimportant detail.
And yes, if you see a kind of reverse ‘Driving Miss Daisy’, it’s not bad at all.
the Film has its title for a guide with the telling subtitle ‘a handbook for negerbilister’, as black at that time could avail of, when they traveled in the american south, compared to where they could eat and the main streets. That we should not further back in time, before raceadskillelsen was determined by the law, comes of course as no surprise, but to see how institutionalized and internalized racism was, is still something of a shock.
Don Shirley is a star on the stage, but in the moment he step out of it again, is he just another ‘hottentot’. ‘Green Book’ contains of course many obvious misadventures, but about midway is also a surprising twist, which bring new facets to the Shirleys character. The movie’s driving force is, however, not surprisingly, the friendship that arises between the two very different men in the course of the two months on the road.
Mortensen plays Tony with so great gestures and so tommetyk Italian accent, that in a lesser actor’s likeness was probably ended up as a caricature, but you end up with to believe in him – yes, eventually keep you actually by him. Mahershala Ali (as right now also is current in the fabulous third season of ‘True Detective’ on HBO), however, is almost even better as the affected, a little unrealistic (and extremely well-dressed) man about town and artist, who insists on maintaining his dignity under even the most humiliating situations.
He can tell a whole story with a single lineament, and out of the movie’s five Oscar nominations are his probably the most well-deserved.
Director Peter Farrelly has in the past most made it in light-hearted comedies like ‘Dumb and dumber’ and ‘Love Mary’, and ‘Green Book’ wins as bonus points for its subtlety, but it clearly has heart in the right place, and if one leaves the chamber without being the least affected along the way, you must be made of harder substance than this reviewer.
Medv.:Viggo Mortensen, Mahershala Ali, Linda Cardellini, Iqbal Theba m.fl.
