https://themuse.jezebel.com/green-book-is-another-film-about-race-for-white-people-1830460623

Despite its frustrating politics, Green Book is the type of film tailor-made to court awards consideration from an Academy that had to be shamed into diversifying its ranks. With its insistence on the pretense of loving our way into racial harmony, the movie exists almost exclusively to allow white moviegoers to nod sagely about “how far we’ve come” before calling the cops on their black neighbors for not waving hello.

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It’s not difficult to enjoy this movie. Farrelly’s experience in comedy comes through clearly in the pithy banter between the leads, doing a lot of the heavy lifting to sell this unlikely friendship. Mortensen and Ali are also intensely charismatic in their roles. They play the contrast between Lip’s working class vulgarity and Shirley’s hard won refinement against each other expertly, mining it for some of the film’s best moments and finding plenty of opportunities to showcase Ali’s distinctive laughter. An endearing plot point about Tony’s letters home to his wife Dolores (Linda Cardellini, doing her best with yet another nothing role as the dutiful wife) injects genuine sentiment into what sometimes become grim proceedings.

But no matter which way you slice it, Green Book is a film about a racist white man making a black friend because he is suddenly given a financial stake in that man’s well-being, forcing his personhood into sharp relief. The movie is told from Lip’s perspective; and of the two men, he is the one given a grounding backstory, family who love him, and a past that gives him context. By the film’s end, we are meant to believe he has changed because he reprimands a family member for describing Shirley with a slur. Never mind that this gives us no indication as to whether his newfound racial tolerance extends past Shirley. Are we supposed to believe that Lip will now be more accepting of the black handymen whose used glasses he tossed into the trash at the start of the film? As with Amma Asante’s ill-considered Where Hands Touch, there is nothing redemptive about a “a one good negro” policy.

That, too, is a point of contention with the film. Don Shirley is depicted as an “exceptional black,” distinct from regular degular shmegular black people by virtue of his talent, education and refinement. He isn’t familiar with the popular “race music” of the time and has to be schooled in how to eat fried chicken by Vallelonga. (Yes, really.) There’s an extended sequence in which he laments, in the rain, that he will never find a place in society because he is shunned by other black people for being too fancy but is still considered the help by whites. Lip even insists that he is the blacker of the two because of his own working class background.

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One could argue that being based on real people, the film is limited by history in the liberties it can take with the story. But given that the film is co-written by Lip’s son Nick Vallelonga, it becomes clearer why the film skews in the direction of dismissing Lip’s racism for the feel-good narrative of a deeply-bonded interracial friendship. In trying to both tout and preserve his father’s legacy, Vallelonga reveals the intrinsic problem with “race movies” like these: they are always, always, always about letting white people off the hook for their individual roles in perpetuating institutional harms.

At the end of the film, as Lip and Shirley are on their way back to New York just in time for Christmas, they are pulled over by a police officer. A previous bad incident earlier in the film has them both on edge, but it turns out they have nothing to fear. The cop just noticed that their tire was flat and wanted to make sure they would be driving safely on roads still slick with fresh snowfall. They change the tire, thank the officer, and head home. On its own, it’s a nothing scene, but in a film expressly about confronting America’s thorny history of race relations released during a year that has seen ever increasing scrutiny on police violence against black people, it acts as a revision of sorts, a “fine people on both sides” narrative quid pro quo that insists on making space for good whites in a racist world that makes no such concessions for its victims. After all, isn’t that the point of a story like this?