Green Book (Peter Farrelly, 2018) may be flawed, but it’s a good watch, as long as you’re white.

It’s inspired by the true story of African-American pianist Dr Don Shirley’s fraught 1962 concert tour of the Deep South, for which he employed Italian-American bouncer Frank “Tony Lip” Vallelonga as his driver and bodyguard. On the road, Tony makes use of The Green Book, a guide for African-American travellers through the segregationist era.

Don is alienated from both his own culture (whatever that means) and from white society. Tony is himself no proponent of civil rights, despite being the object of a lesser racism—but as he experiences the shocking degradations to which his boss is subjected on tour, gradually they bond.

In the words of Rotten tomatoes, it’s “an excessively smooth ride through bumpy subject matter”. Some reviews (e.g. rogerebert.com, and the Guardian) note the film’s problems but are inclined to downplay them, and sterner critics too concede that the portrayals from Mahershala Ali and Viggo Mortensen are compelling.

But several reviewers, like Melanie McFarland, have more detailed critiques of the “lazy, feel-good take on race”. She notes how the movie combines “the white saviour trope with the story of a bigot’s redemption”, and that the movie “presents violent manifestations of racial animus as an unfortunate element of a distant past” (cf. this even more scathing appraisal).

The climactic scene in a black blues bar (where Don begins by winning the crowd over with Chopin—really?) is both cheesy and exhilarating (still McFarland: “the part we’re meant to note is Shirley’s only natural expression of joy comes near the end of the movie when let loose on a cheap and worn piano in a deep-South blues joint among his own people. You know, where he belongs.”) Such

escapist Social Progress tales drawn from a mythologized version of history […] reassure mainstream white audiences of how far we’ve come as a nation despite the headlines about a spike in hate crimes, the rising white nationalist presence within law enforcement and in politics, racially motivated mass shootings and widening wealth gaps between whites and non-white minority groups.

In similar vein are reviews in Vox and Vanity fair.

It’s a not infrequent experience to enjoy a work of art before (and even after) someone quite rightly points out that you shouldn’t… However well-meaning (or canny) its attempts to atone for racism and sexism (cf. Barbie), Hollywood remains an unlikely source of enlightenment.

See also The Tulsa race massacre, America over the water, A Hollywood roundtable, and An Indigenous people’s history of the United States.

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Still, it’s good for Don Shirley’s ouevre to reach a wider audience. Some samples:

Orpheus in the underworld (as playlist):

Among several Greatest hits albums:

A live version of My funny Valentine:

How high the moon live on TV:

Yesterday:

and this short interview.

See also under A jazz medley, including Black and white.