Mahershala Ali (Moonlight, Hidden Figures) and Viggo Mortensen (A Most Violent Year, Hidalgo) deliver the year’s best cinematic performances as a duo in the unerringly precise, refined and rational Green Book. This outstanding picture, one of 2018’s best three movies with Won’t You Be My Neighbor? and Love, Simon, pierces today’s worst and most damaging illusions.
The first third of Green Book focuses on one man, whose name is Tony (Mortensen). He’s a hardworking bouncer from the Bronx with a shady past, rough exterior and a wife and kids at home.
The year is 1962. As with all of these naturalistic movies, context is crucial.
The context of the early Sixties, before the darkness of the late Sixties looms (with one, brief shining moment of man’s greatness in 1969), permeates the movie in subtle ways. Race, sex and class emerge in various scenes as factors for Tony; who he is and who he chooses to be. As a worker, he struggles to make ends meet. As someone who happens to be white, Tony is also by choice ignorant, prejudiced and partially racist.
Working among cigarette girls, gangsters and mostly people just like him, which is to say people within an extremely insular ethnic subculture (he’s of Italian ancestry), Tony disdains the Negro workers his wife welcomes into their home. He doesn’t question why — and how many Kent cigarettes — he smokes. He doesn’t challenge a Catholic prayer before dinner, let alone the heavy deployment of religious paraphernalia, from crucifix to church calendar, in his home. He doesn’t doubt the constant speaking of a foreign language in his home — and in the presence of his children — either. Tony is a byproduct of his chosen means and ways, prejudices and traditions; he is 100 percent submissive to the status quo.
As a man, however, and this is why Green Book— like Won’t You Be My Neighbor? and Love, Simon— is (very much against the predominant feminist trend) a movie about what being a man means, Tony wants to improve. He may choose to dispense with glass specimens because they are tainted in his deformed mind by Negroes. But he also chose as his lifelong mate a woman who corrects his mistakes and scorns her husband’s ignorance.
Enter a man who lives above a grand and enlightened place, as the movie demonstrates, “created by Andrew Carnegie.”
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In this new and worldly home, where muscled Tony’s solid bouncer reputation yields the reason he’s there for a job prospect not to be taken on faith, Tony meets the first man to actively engage and challenge his mind. This man, Don Shirley, portrayed by Ali in another superior performance, is uncompromising in applying his high standards. Don Shirley asks Tony what he does for a living and, when Tony gives the stock answer, ups the ante with: “In what capacity?”
That Tony steals a pen on the way out of the wealthy Negro musician’s exotic, lavish home suggests that the job he’s seeking — bodyguard and driver to the artist and his band as they tour the American South — may itself pose a character challenge. Mortensen is excellent in the role.
But his performance is matched by Ali’s, which is the more restrained performance. What begins to bridge the gap as the pair travel in one car (with bandmates in another) from Pittsburgh to Ohio and Indiana, where, predictably if you’ve been there, outward signs of racism start showing. Things worsen in Kentucky. They get worse down South.
So why go there?
For the same reasons Don Shirley did, which become clear as Green Book turns its touring pages and chugs along, driving deeper and deeper into the belly of the beast. Through it all, the focal point for Tony is that his boss hired him for his ability, not merely for his muscles. This is new for Tony. Also new is that his new two-month boss does so as a trade — not as a favor, an Italian blood tie or an act of intimidation. The mob muscle, whose financial trouble leads him into a pawn shop, comes to expect something of himself, for a change. As he does, he realizes, as Tony puts it: “Geniuses think.”
The smallest scenes and subtleties of Green Book diverge and converge in fresh and surprising turns and twists. Multilingual Mr. Shirley, whom Tony favorably reports to his wife is as good as Liberace, instructs and tutors his newest and roughest employee.
But he performs on his own terms. Insisting on playing piano on the Steinway brand, with a bottle of whiskey in his room every night, Ali’s Don Shirley is cultured, dark, reserved, remote and mysterious. Like any sophisticated black man (arguably, then and now), Don Shirley gains a sense of mission and empowerment from his burgeoning relationship with the ignorant thug from the Bronx. By the time he plays “Happy Talk” from Rodgers & Hammerstein’s South Pacific, an interestingly, thematically infused song for Green Book, his overdrinking and Tony’s oversmoking overlap for the stuff of a real, complex and combustible friendship.
Co-writer and director Peter Farrelly (Dumb and Dumber, There’s Something About Mary) has a knack for comedy. This is apparent. But this is not what powers Green Book and, notably, the comedy sometimes gets in the way of the film’s best moments. What Farrelly does best is provide the script, cast and photography with an ideal canvas. For example, in one scene, field workers gape in wonder at the black man who emerges from a car being serviced by a white manservant.
The astonished Negroes in the field mark a key and swift transition that unfolds into an emotionally powerful disclosure about Don Shirley. It comes after a visit to Stuckey’s, another act of persecution in Georgia and Tony rambling (as Tony tends to do) about Willie Mays and Joe DiMaggio. It comes before references to composers Liszt, Brahms and Chopin, Attorney General Robert Kennedy and Christmastime in Alabama and the plot pivot makes a salient point within an already sharp point about the invisibility of man’s sexuality; how people tend to see too narrowly what they wish to see.
With a vodka toast over the legacy of Nat King Cole, courage and incontrovertible either-or of moral choices, Green Book culminates in a two-factor authentication of each man’s pride in his work and the virtue of productiveness. With classical piano, jazz, rock, pop and blues, snow storms, guns, fists and a Christmas miracle, Green Book (executive produced by Ali’s Hidden Figures co-star actress Octavia Spencer) closes with a scene which capturesthe benevolence of Christmas, making this the perfect Thanksgiving movie. Like Won’t You Be My Neighbor? and Love, Simon, Green Book, co-starring Linda Cardellini (Brokeback Mountain, Avengers: Age of Ultron) as Tony’s wife, renders a stirring depiction of the reward of being the rational man and the loneliness of being ahead of one’s time.
Besides my recent winter visit to Western Pennsylvania, which included a stay at the Fairmont in downtown Pittsburgh and a trip to the Heinz History Center to see the National Constitution Center’s exhibit on Prohibition before it closes, I’ve been attending screenings of Westerns at the Autry Museum of the American West. This was my first time seeing director John Ford’s Stagecoach starring John Wayne on the big screen.
I was as entranced by the thoughtful epic as ever. Read my Stagecoach review, which is posted at the New Romanticist. One of the advantages of seeing movies at the Autry is that they usually show the film in 35mm or 70mm prints in the Griffith Park museum’s Wells Fargo Theatre. Screenings include lectures by historians, scholars and other intellectuals and Stagecoach, which made John Wayne a movie star, was no exception. My review includes notes on the pre-film lecture.
The other Western I saw there is John Ford’s Sergeant Rutledge, a groundbreaking 1960 movie about a wrongly accused man (such a thing is possible, though these days you might not know it) trying to overcome racism in the West. This unknown movie, which I had neither seen nor heard of before, was introduced at the Autry with an abundance of fascinating facts and information.
Apparently, the film’s story of a wronged Buffalo Soldier is rooted in the truth about the all-black U.S. cavalry unit which was active in the Indian Wars. Blacks had been brought as slaves to Texas for ranching, the audience learned, and, following the Civil War, after so many men died in combat, blacks were often the most experienced and knowledgeable about ranching. So, black cowboys were not uncommon. Sergeant Rutledge is essentially the tale of a black cowboy who leads the Buffalo Soldiers before he is charged with raping and murdering a white woman. The leading part is played by Woody Strode (Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, The Quick and the Dead), the first lead black actor in a major studio’s Western. The studio apparently wanted a known black actor, such as Sidney Poitier, cast in the role. John Ford insisted on casting newcomer Strode, the Autry speaker explained, for his striking good looks and superior physique.
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Besides the movie’s injustice theme, Ford was drawn to cavalry stories (as most John Ford fans know). He was fascinated by the American West, especially as depicted by artists Charles Russell and Frederic Remington, whose paintings he attempted to replicate or evoke in his motion pictures. Sergeant Rutledge is the favorite role for Woody Strode, who also appeared in the opening shot of director Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West. The son of an interracial couple himself, Strode married outside his own race, too, to a Hawaiian princess, the Autry audience learned, and he became and remained close friends with John Ford. The former UCLA athlete appeared in several other Ford pictures and, years later, when Ford fell and broke his leg at his Southern California desert home, his only call for help went to Woody Strode, who moved in with the old movie director and assisted Ford’s recovery for four and a half months. The friendship was reciprocal, according to the Autry. When Strode’s mother died, and he couldn’t afford to pay for her funeral, Ford picked up the tab.
In an interesting twist, at least to me, I saw Sergeant Rutledge on the opening weekend of Marvel Studios’ hit Black Panther movie for Disney. What a contrast in depictions of heroic characters who are black. Other Westerns or cowboy-themed movies reviewed based on screenings with lectures at the Autry include Forty Guns (1957) starring Barbara Stanwyck, High Noon (1952) with Gary Cooper, The Big Country (1958) with Gregory Peck, Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! (1955) and The Virginian (1946) starring Joel McCrea.
Depicting Thurgood Marshall as brash, fast-talking and arrogant, with a chip on his shoulder, some might even use the word “uppity”, especially in 1941 when the movie Marshall takes place, fall’s new biographical picture features Chadwick Boseman (Get On Up, 42, Black Panther in the Marvel Comics film series, such as Captain America: Civil War) in another fine turn as a man of ability.
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Steeped in grainy, period detail with Ruth Carter’s costumes, a kind of reverence for black subculture and U.S. history and a mocking reference to “old Negro superstition”, TV director Reginald Hudlin does a skillful job, too, recreating a single, early marker in the life of the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. Marhsall was a lone lawyer for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), a historically enslaved and persecuted group of Americans that needed a legal defense different from whites because they were treated as lesser than whites.
Enter Marshall, who’s riding rails to defend presumably innocent blacks when he’s not stirring up trouble with Harlem renaissance figures such as poet and Communist sympathizer Langston Hughes (Jussie Smollett, Empire), who may have been gay, and freethinking Republican Zora Neale Hurston (Rozonda ‘Chilli” Thomas), author of Their Eyes Were Watching God. With a beautiful, pregnant young wife who wants him home more often, Marshall feels the push and pressure of being a pioneer while trying to cash in on the change he seeks to enact.
As fictionalized here, and it is dramatized with liberties taken, including certain, key facts and that Boseman looks nothing like Marshall, Marshall teams up with white, Jewish lawyer Sam Friedman (Josh Gad, Frozen, A Dog’s Purpose) and defends an accused Negro rapist (Sterling K. Brown, This Is Us) against his wealthy, white employer (Kate Hudson, Raising Helen, Almost Famous). It’s a highly controversial case with several discrepancies, an all-white jury and strict judge (James Cromwell, The Artist) presiding and, curiously, how it plays out under Marshall’s guidance contradicts current left-wing “rape-culture” dogma (read an account of the real life case with spoilers here).
The cast is outstanding and, while Marshall is episodic to the tee which will disappoint those who, like me, may anticipate a wider perspective, this applies to everyone, even supporting actors and Hudson, whose acting I’ve criticized in the past. Brown (This Is Us, Darden in the recent O.J. Simpson murder trial TV series) is among the screen’s best actors bar none and Cromwell (Surrogates, The Queen, Spider-Man 3) is at his best. So, I hope first-time feature director Hudlin makes this the first of a trilogy or something — if I dare to imagine a movie franchise based on men of the mind — about Marshall (Marshall 2: Brown v. Board of Education?) and, personally, I’d love to see spinoffs about Hughes and especially the underappreciated Hurston, though they play bit parts here. As fine a director as he is in working with his actors and establishing the scenes, and the set and production design are really fabulous, Hudlin trips with little details.
For instance, the prosecutor (blue-eyed Dan Stevens, the beast in Disney’s recent remake of Beauty and the Beast) is the stereotypical bigoted white villain. Also, I didn’t figure out that Brown’s character worked for the woman until well into the courtroom drama and I wanted to know at least a bit about Brown’s relationship with his wife, which I think might have added another layer to Marshall‘s humanist theme. As it is, however, Marshall marshals its impressive resources, including good music, with dignity and respect, and a degree of subtlety, which racist, tribalist and race-baiting critics are likely to miss.
With frankness about the NAACP’s self-serving aims, license in favor of Marshall’s role at the expense of Friedman’s and twists you might not see coming, stylish, clever plot points gently unfurl. One of them, with two men ultimately, simply disconnecting, as happens in life, accentuates the separatism.
The meaning of the movie’s lightbulb moment, which skillfully cuts to what catapults Thurgood Marshall from ambitious young lawyer to long-range thinking champion for the oppressed, may be missed if you don’t think twice. But my favorite scene entails a whites-only drinking fountain and the matter of fact way in which the title character selfishly serves and suits himself, living in — to paraphrase Ayn Rand — the future he fights for today. As with Clint Eastwood‘s Mandela movie, Invictus, 2009’s best movie, Marshall depicts Marshall in only his best and most heroic sense and it’s up to historians to sort fact from fiction. Here, America’s first black Supreme Court justice is portrayed in his younger years as marvelously intransigent. Look for an elegant ending courtesy of three characters in cameos by Trayvon Martin’s parents and their thoughtful attorney.
What was it like to be black, female and exceptionally skilled in 1961? This question is at the core of writer and director Theodore Melfi‘s Hidden Figures, a topical, authentic and fascinating look back at mid-20th century American exceptionalism from a fresh and life-affirming perspective. Melfi (St. Vincent), who co-wrote the screenplay, probes beyond racism, making this movie fuller than others in the mid-century American true story genre (Selma comes to mind).
Hidden Figures is as logical as math. As with 42, the movie is direct and linear, so what you see and get is a depiction of the woman of ability in three workers for the U.S. space program: Mary Jackson (singer Janelle Monae, Moonlight), Dorothy Vaughan (Octavia Spencer, Black or White) and Katherine Goble (Taraji P. Henson, Cookie on Empire)—all working to launch an American astronaut into orbit.
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Prefaced by a flashback that sets this up with a drama of the gifted child, to bend a phrase from Alice Miller, Hidden Figures (based on a book) starts with the trio stranded on a Virginia roadside. Spencer’s Dorothy solves a car problem. Mary sasses. Katherine imagines. A trajectory is charted from there.
The direction is upward, with a few twists and offshoots. Tracking the Soviet Sputnik satellite, which posed a threat to the United States, NASA’s Mercury and Friendship programs and the effort to put John Glenn into orbit, Melfi and company recreate rational action led by a boss portrayed by Kevin Costner (Black or White). Costner’s character personifies the secular humanist theme, reminding his numbers-crunching, Langley, Virginia, team that calculations for putting man into space ultimately redound to the individual and one’s values here on earth.
“Look past numbers”, he urges, a piece of wisdom which applies to today’s aggregated and automated industries—especially to those working in government programs—and choose instead to think. When he needs someone who knows math, up from the team’s pool of segregated black women, despite the instant desegregation, comes a particularly bright Negro named Katherine (Henson). This lady knows advanced math. More crucial to the boss, the mission and her life, she knows how to tune out distraction and avoid any tendency to rationalize. Similarly, and appropos of their abilities, Mary and Dorothy put their goals on track, too, while helping to put John Glenn in space. Glenn, who later became a U.S. senator from Ohio who propagated the welfare state and who recently died, is portrayed as a freethinker.
The script serves each character’s turn. For example, Dorothy (Spencer), going against a bureaucrat (Kirsten Dunst in a career best performance), strives to match her skills to her livelihood. From tinkering with the stalled car to being first to step up to face bad news (the film tracks the civil rights movement, too), her vigorous leadership is integral in her everyday life. Sassy Mary (Monae doing a fine job) chooses to focus her smart mouth on breaking a racist barrier and becoming an engineer. She’s also unashamed to express sexual desire for a white man and do what a white man (who’s a Jew) says he wants her to do as she builds the case for her own cause.
The women in Hidden Figures act for selfishness, not for altruism.
This is undeniable; they do not act for the sake of the race, tribe, sex, God or others. Each woman bases her identity on character and her self-esteem on knowledge gained by her reasoning mind. Dorothy, in a triumphant scene, chooses to reclaim property which she properly regards as hers, explaining the context to her son, who thinks Mom is stealing from the government. Dorothy does this to acquire knowledge, amplifying the point. Octavia Spencer (Snowpiercer, Black or White, Zootopia) portrays Dorothy Vaughan’s determination with precision in a measured performance which underscores that she is one of the screen’s best actresses. So, too, does Henson as Katherine, who meets a man (Mahershala Ali, the drug dealer in Moonlight) during her NASA tenure.
Katherine pushes, tests and strives to be her best against extreme prejudice and this, too, is undeniable. Rarely has the toilet’s role in the American history of ostracizing others been so memorably dramatized as in this sequence of workplace coffee scenes leading up to a total breakdown. Melfi captures the emotional damage inflicted by those moved by collectivism—in this case, by its most primitive variant, racism—upon the individual. He does this through strong and subtle character development in performances which all shine, down to the smallest roles, including his wife Kimberly Quinn’s as Ruth and Jim Parsons’ as lead engineer.
The three leads (and Costner) excel at the top of the cast, showing that each woman of the mind simply tries to do her best work; moreover, each woman enjoys her work and knows its value, which is why the film’s positivism is a crucial, bold and skillfully made decision. Activism becomes an urgent practical necessity born of the clash between progress and bad philosophy, i.e., traditionalism and collectivism.
This is what makes Hidden Figures inspiring. These women were pioneers, yet they were exceptional, producing impeccable results for the greatest nation on earth. Melfi recognizes this, too, and he does so with his trademark poignancy and humor (see his St. Vincent if you haven’t already) in scene after scene. These three women were ambitious, proud and selfish—qualities we’re taught to reject as unsavory—and he honors them both for acting as egoists and as Americans who refuse to opt out of a partly unjust, partly free and changing society. Mary, Dorothy and Katherine, as portrayed in Hidden Figures, act as if they know that their defiance of the U.S. government is an assertion of their moral right to pursue happiness. Each unmistakably acts for her own sake. Yet each acts as unmistakably as a patriotic American. Hidden Figures shows that this alignment was especially, powerfully hard and admirable for the black woman of the mind.
But you need not hold selfishness as the top virtue to find something wondrous and enlightening in the stories of these Hidden Figures.
Though it tends to come off as too good to be true, skimming too much of their lives, Hidden Figures displays a certain love for one’s work—depicting reverence for productiveness—in carrying out a mission which concretizes America at her best. In this way, Theodore Melfi’s Hidden Figures dramatizes that, in America, the individual who calculates what’s in her self-interest can—despite whatever others and the government do to keep her down—reach for the stars and achieve whatever she wants.
Loving by Jeff Nichols (Midnight Special, Mud, Take Shelter) starring Joel Edgerton (Midnight Special, The Great Gatsby) and Ruth Negga (World War Z) captures at once the tension of man’s morally principled stand against the state, love’s intimacy and the immeasurable toll government control exacts upon the best people.
As it does, Loving deftly tests one’s rationality at every turn, demanding that the audience—woman or man, white or black—examine closely, and subconsciously, held biases, values and ideals. Like this season’s other lyrical movie about forbidden love, Moonlight, and other such tales (Brokeback Mountain comes to mind), Loving comes in three parts: breaking from tradition, getting caught and the final accounting with the facts of reality. It’s a hard, moving and elegiac movie and it ranks with Black or White and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinnerhigh among Hollywood’s greatest interracial-themed films.
Unlike those other movies, however, Loving‘s lust, love and guiltlessness is on full display. In fact, writer and director Nichols, a native Arkansan who lives in the Lone Star State as he told the screening’s audience this weekend in Hollywood, immerses the moviegoer in the nine-year saga of a Virginia married couple who, from 1958 to 1967, defied the state at every turn.
Opening with the prolonged singing of crickets against a dark screen to draw you into their world, layering in sights and sounds of Old Dominion’s nature and the manmade, from leisurely grasshoppers—the “birds and the bees”—to drag-racing and gunning of Ford Motor Company Galaxies and Fairlanes, mid-century mid-Southern living means hard work and easy, natural loving. Men, including blond, white and brawny Richard Loving (Edgerton, studied and owning the role) concentrate on every detail in manual labor. Men and women, black and white, toil under hoods of cars tinkering with engines, on blazing sun-drenched construction sites smoothing concrete edges and in wooden rooms delivering babies.
In one emblematic scene, they toil in tobacco fields and, as the camera pans, it becomes clear that it’s been almost a hundred years since the end of the Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation. Races by now are mixed and, amid the race mixing, with poor whites such as Loving and biracial or multiracial people such as his girlfriend Mildred (Negga in a subtly mannered performance), this part of a Virginia county is a community. Marriage of a white man to a partially black woman (which happened in real life and is the basis for this movie) is almost like breaking a sweat in the fields or cracking open a beer; it ought to be mere fact of life.
Only it isn’t an acceptable notion and everybody knows it. Except for Richard Loving, who takes his bride to where it’s legal to marry among different races and comes back to the county where all hell breaks loose and someone—it’s never disclosed who—snitches to the police, who enforce the archaic law banning interracial marriage by breaking in on the married couple’s bedroom. Almost as soon as the cop (Marton Csokas, Amazing Spider-Man 2, Alice in Wonderland) invokes religion—condemning the man-woman relationship as breaking “God’s law”—the newlyweds proclaim themselves “Guilty”. They go to jail. And Mrs. Loving is pregnant.
But Nichols, as he did in Midnight Special, Take Shelter and Mud, brings in the winds of change, which keep blowing and regenerating the lands and minds of Loving. Mildred and Rich Loving, like outcasts, forbidden lovers and persecuted others everywhere, try to live by the rules and can’t abide. One of the smartest things about the screenplay is its insistence on going slow, not fast, in showing how Mr. and Mrs. Loving fail to disown their egos—living apart, leaving the county, the state, and their families—in order to be a married couple. As they keep having kids, with the U.S. Capitol and Washington Monument in the backdrop, Nichols dramatizes the folly of selflessness.
Winds blow, lives are torn apart and Loving sifts through the years as they live in fear of total government control of their lives. In this way, thanks to Nichols, Negga and especially Edgerton’s flawless performance as a man who is completely alone among his fellow men, Loving is emotionally powerful like Snowden. A scene at the bar where he drinks beer with his drag racing buddies confirms that collectivism (i.e., racism) contaminates every part of his life and Richard Loving’s response is a wrenching depiction of statism’s harmful impact on the individual. “I love my wife”, Loving says at a crucial point. But when he does, he knows the terrible and unjust cost of refusing to be conquered by the violation of his rights.
The man who labors, races and loves his wife and children is a credit to himself, however. In a single exercise of free speech, someone reaches out for help and help goes on the way. It’s a long time and hard fight in coming and the waiting robs the couple of time. That one of their only precious and private moments comes during a brief rest during The Andy Griffith Show with a Life photographer on hand is integral to the historic couple’s unique tragedy and legacy. This lesson is the moral of Nichols’ searing yet gilded new fable.
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