REVIEW

THIS is traditionally a strong time of year for powerful dramatic films, no doubt calculatedly released in awards season. For the upcoming Academy Awards, there will be many hopeful film directors that the shine of a few gongs will rub off handsomely at the box-office.

Green Book is another such potential Academy winner. Set in the early Sixties, is a sweet, engagingly unsubtle picture inspired by the true story of Don Shirley (Mahershala Ali), a prodigiously talented African-American musician whose colour has prevented him from pursuing the career he has trained for, as a classical concert pianist.

Instead, he has formed the “easy listening” Don Shirley trio, which in the late autumn of 1962 is about to embark on a tour of the Deep South. Don, genteel and fastidious, needs a driver who might be able to protect him from the racial discrimination he is bound to encounter below the Mason-Dixon line.

By now we know just who this minder will be; the film opens at New York City’s Copacabana nightclub, where “Tony Lip” Vallelonga (Viggo Mortensen) is a no-nonsense bouncer not averse to currying favour with the mafia bosses who frequent the place. At home in the Bronx, where a volatile Italian-American life pounds around him, Tony shouts for the Yankees and eats 26 hotdogs at a sitting to win a bet.

That’s the kind of character persona he gives. He’s also a devoted family man who loves his wife Dolores (Linda Cardellini) and their two sons – and throws away a pair of drinking glasses because they have been used by black tradesmen.

He’s a racist, boorish and gluttonous, a full pendulum-swing from educated, sensitive, restrained Don, but that’s OK, because, as director, Peter Farrelly signposts in neon from the start, he is about to take a journey not just towards Kentucky, Georgia and Louisiana, but also towards enlightenment.

Tony needs a temporary job because the Copa is closed for renovations. An advert leads him to Don’s bohemian apartment above Carnegie Hall.

He is duly hired, and, trying to suppress the discomfort he feels about working for a black man, prepares himself for two months on the road, with a set of responsibilities that include making sure that Don has a Steinway piano for every gig.

He is also handed the film’s titular Green Book, a guide for “Negro motorists” driving in the South, advising them where they may eat and sleep to ensure a “vacation without aggravation”.

The film, which was co-written by Vallelonga’s son Nick, has resounding echoes of Pygmalion and even Cyrano de Bergerac as Don seeks to pass on some of his own refinement to the distinctly unrefined Tony.

It’s not exactly subtle. After all, Farrelly, who gave us Dumb And Dumber all those years ago, did not make his name through subtlety.

Some of this film’s minor characters, from New York mobsters to snarling Southern rednecks, are sketchily-drawn caricatures.

And several of the predicaments in which Don and Tony find themselves scream for a little more nuance, as when, having been given a lavish welcome at an ante-bellum mansion where his trio are providing the entertainment, Don asks for the bathroom and is directed outside, to a comic-book tumbledown latrine.

This might well be an accurate depiction of the bigotry and hypocrisy that scarred the segregated South before civil rights legislation, and indeed there really was a Green Book, but it feels more heavy-handed than it needs to be. So, too, does a climax of triple-ply sentimentality. But you may well brush away a tear as this film runs on.

That’s because, despite its shortcomings, this film really works, thanks in large part to the genuinely terrific and moving performances of Mortensen and Ali.

Both have been nominated for Academy Awards, and the latter is odds-on favourite to bag Best Supporting Actor, as he did three years for Moonlight.

In truth, however, it’s only in the second half of this odd-couple road trip that he is conspicuously stretched, as Don, predictably enough, begins to learn as much from Tony as he imparts. Until then, unlike his spectacular piano-playing, it’s rather a one-note performance.

Verdict: Engagingly unsubtle

★★★★