In my continuing saga to see "Christmas movies," we saw Green Book this weekend.
Let me say this: if this is the Best Picture, then it wasn't a great year.
It's good. Maybe very good.
But it's not "best."
If you missed the gist of the story, it's Driving Miss Daisy, except the twist is the driver is the white one. And I guess Mahershala Ali isn't "miss." But you get the idea.
Car, driver, drivee: two worlds. They interact. Come to know each other and, Lo and Behold! become friends.
I'm not sure there's a real twist here. Because it's based on a true story? Nah.
Viggo Mortensen is good as Tony "Lip" -- a New York bouncer who has enough reputation as a driver, bouncer, etc, to be recommended for a two-month trip with Ali's Doctor Shirley, a jazz trio pianist of some fame who is doing a circuit through the South. This is 1962.
Ali is good, too. Where Mortensen doesn't have to get far from the early 60s working class New York Italian stereotype, Ali is both a cultured African-American (there's a shot of them stuck on the road opposite African-Americans in a field -- we might think it's cotton), a man with some money, but still the color of his skin in the South means, in the one example, he can't eat in the very restaurant where he is the headliner to play that night.
They do a good job of interacting; it's good to see Tony do his job well and to develop, and it's good to see Doc gets his fingers dirty with KFC and ripping up some dance music in an impromptu session in a club.
It's worth seeing. Does it do anything in terms of story, in terms of camera work, in terms of anything that gets outside the box? No. But it's a good, solid story. See it.
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