A gifted musician in the early 1960s adapts according to the “Green Book”
As I entered the auditorium at Cinema Arts in Fairfax VA late Thursday to see “Green Book”, an elderly man leaving it said “you’ll enjoy this.” No one has ever done that at a movie. True, it won the Golden Globe for best musical or comedy.
The title of this biographical dramedy, directed by Peter Farrelly, refers to an actual “best seller” (“Negro Motorist Green Book“) around 1962 (that means something in my world as a POD author) that listed business establishments in the South that “colored” could use.
The basic story is that of classical and jazz pianist and composer Donald Walbridge Shirley (1927-2013), or simply Don Shirley (Mahershala Ali). In the fall of 1962, a bouncer Tony Lip (Viggo Mortensen) at the Copacabana in New York takes a job as Shirley’s driver and road manager on a tour throughout the Midwest and then the deep South.
Don is actually rich, and can live reasonably well in New York. But in the deep south, the pair will face all the canards of segregation, leading to a climactic sequence at a Christmas party at an estate in Birmingham, Alabama, where the white people want to be entertained by this “black minstrel” but won’t let him sit with them for dinner. He winds up going to a dive where he bangs out Chopin’s Revolutionary Etude (C Minor) on an upright piano as a great crowd pleaser.
Don also says at one point that he doesn’t “belong” anywhere. He adapts classical music to please the populist needs of others. He isn’t welcome in his own black community because he is rich.
But most of Don’s performances are popular memes on classical themes, with his trio. This all reminds me of my own attitudes when I was a patient at NIH in 1962, and told therapists (at 19) that I feared I could “tire” of music (like saying one doesn’t tire of Brahms or Schubert), based in turn on a disturbing conversation I had endured with a chum at William and Mary back in 1961. That incident in fact deserves a post on my “DADT notes blog” and I hadn’t though about it for years until seeing this film. I remember in therapy some stuff about popular vs. classical music, which this film illustrates. (The Metropolis Ensemble concerts earlier this week take a different tack.)
Don, who would have been 35 in 1962, is also extremely articulate and moralistic. He is always preaching to Tony how to behave, like putting back a gemstone rock he found at an outdoor bazaar (paying for it). He is also homosexual, and gets busted once with a white man. But Tony is determined to get Don to every single performance on time, and he does (until the breakdown in Alabama).
Name: “Green Book“
Director, writer: Peter Farrelly
Released: 2019
Format: 2.00:1
When and how viewed: 2019/1/10 at Cinema Arts Fairfax VA small crowd
Length: 130
Rating: PG-13
Companies: Universal, Dreamworks, Amblin, Participant Media
Link: official
Stars: ****_
(Posted: Friday, January 11, 2019 at 11:45 AM)