Peter Farrelly’s biographical comedy Green Book is up for five Oscars but remains one of the awards season’s most controversial movies. The upcoming 2019 Academy Awards features a mixed bag of nominees. There are some positives: Marvel broke the superhero ceiling and saw Black Panther become a Best Picture nominee; the legendary Spike Lee finally landed his first Best Director nomination for BlacKkKlansman, and Alfonso Cuaron’s Roma remains the front-runner in spite of its Netflix status. But then there’s the Bohemian Rhapsody problem, as well as the absence of female directors, once more. At the heart of this hurricane is a small movie called Green Book.
Before Green Book premiered at TIFF, critics didn’t have high hopes for it. It was, after all, the first “serious” movie of Farrelly, the guy who made Dumb and Dumber and There’s Something About Mary, and followed a true story - a white driver accompanying a legendary black jazz pianist through a tour of the American south - that immediately inspired comparisons to Driving Miss Daisy. Then it screened to major critical acclaim and took home the coveted Audience Award, thus catapulting it to the front of the Best Picture Oscar race. That position seemed secure when it took home the 2019 Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture – Comedy or Musical and the Producers Guild of America Award. On top of that, Mahershala Ali seemed all but destined to win his second Best Supporting Actor Oscar.
Green Book has made a decent amount of money - $61.4 million from a $23 million budget - and has its fair share of critical fans. It’s nowhere near the most critically lambasted film of 2018, or even the worst reviewed Best Picture nominee (an honor that falls upon Bohemian Rhapsody). Still, it would be foolish to understand this film and the conversations around it solely by reviews, especially those that come from the first flush of festival excitement. Green Book may seem like a pretty benign film on its own, but it still remains a potent symbol of Hollywood’s problems and how far they still have to go on many issues.
- This Page: Green Book’s Inaccurate Story Next Page: Green Book’s Controversial Crew & Being Out Of Date
The Accuracy of Green Book’s Story Has Been Questioned Repeatedly
The issue of biopics and their adherence to historical truth has been a problem for as long as the genre has existed. It’s an ethical quandary that questions if creative freedom can come at the price of re-imagining truth. Many filmmakers and studios wrestle with this topic and how involved any surviving family members should be in the making of the story. Green Book is not the first film to face this problem – once again, Bohemian Rhapsody has been under the same magnifying glass of scrutiny this awards season – but its particular methods of dealing with this have raised further eyebrows and been called out as insensitive by the family of one of the portrayed subjects.
Green Book is the passion project of Nick Vallelonga. His father, Tony Lip (Viggo Mortensen), was the man who was seemingly friends with pianist Don Shirley (Ali) and accompanied him to safety through a tour of the still-segregated American South. Vallelonga co-wrote the screenplay, along with Farrelly and Brian Hayes Currie, and is also credited as a producer. Family involvement in a biopic is not uncommon, although it’s less heard of for the project itself to be the creative brain-child of one of the subject’s offspring. This opened up various questions about the validity of Vallelonga’s version of events and his agenda. In a story about a famed black musician with its title taken from The Negro Motorist Green Book, why was this story centered on the white guy? These problems were growing long before Shirley’s family called out what they felt was misrepresentation of history and their relative.
Shirley’s nephew Edwin Shirley III, among other family members, has condemned Green Book’s interpretation of Shirley as “a symphony of lies” (via Shadow and Act). Particular moments in the film refuted by Shirley’s family include the claims that Shirley was estranged from his relatives at the time, that Lip and Shirley were ever friends to begin with, and that a now infamous scene where Lip introduces Shirley to fried chicken never happened. Edwin Shirley also claimed that his uncle had never wanted a film made about his life (Vallelonga claims he sought permission from Shirley before writing the script).
Furthermore, Ali’s statement that he wasn’t aware Shirley’s relatives were still living and that he could’ve consulted with them prior to filming has caused further complications with the veracity of Vallelonga and Farrelly’s claims about Shirley’s life. And with Farrelly expressing a similar sentiment to Ali, it’s bad optics for this biopic about two men to be described as a completely true story by the family of one of the (white) subjects while the other relatives of the black subject fully deny that. Given Hollywood’s long-favored penchant for telling stories of race relations through a white gaze (the Driving Miss Daisy comparisons exist for a reason), Green Book needed to do a lot more to avoid those pitfalls if it wanted to remain a story written and directed by white men. In 2019, those questions are louder than ever, and Green Book doesn’t answer them.
Page 2 of 2: Green Book’s Controversial Crew & Being Out Of Date
The Controversy Surrounding Peter Farrelly and Nick Vallelonga
Green Book may have been able to deal more effectively with its criticism had the cast and crew been prepared to deal with the conversation. Ali, for his part, has been gracious and humble regarding his depiction of Shirley and the family questions surrounding it (although it also feels worth noting how much of the public pressure around this film has fallen to the black man at the center of it rather than any of his white colleagues). Viggo Mortensen, who plays Lip, has been mostly quiet but also left a sour taste in many people’s mouths when he dismissed the Shirley family’s anger as being rooted in “resentment.” But the lion’s share of the chaos has come from the director and screenwriter, and not all of it has come from the film itself.
Vallelonga made headlines when an old tweet of his was unearthed wherein he pushed a heavily debunked conspiracy that Muslims celebrated in New Jersey after the attacks of 9/11 (said tweet was sent to Donald Trump). The tweet was quickly pulled after going viral, and Vallelonga apologized, but it’s tough to ignore the optics of a screenwriter whose film is being accused of racial insensitivity tweeting out a racist conspiracy theory. Farrelly’s controversies also heavily stem from old quotes and actions. As detailed in The Cut, Farrelly had previously proudly bragged about flashing people on the sets of his movies as a “joke.” The act of exposing his genitalia to his co-workers, many of whom were younger women, is described as one of his “trademark gags.” Farrelly also apologized for his past behavior, but for many in this post-Weinstein age of Hollywood, this is not an industry issue that can be solved with one apology.
Green Book is Out of Date With the Times
The thing about Green Book is that it is, in many ways, the perfect Oscar movie: A respected director takes a dramatic shift from their previous work to tell the unknown true story of racial harmony and feelgood friendship, with two beloved award-winning stars in the leads. It’s easy to see this movie being a hit in, say, 1989, with Morgan Freeman and Tom Cruise as the leads, or in the mid-1960s with Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier. But that’s also the problem: This is an Oscar movie from a very different time.
In a year with Black Panther, BlacKkKlansman, The Favourite, and Roma filling out the Best Picture category, Green Book cannot help but feel like a throwback to another time of Hollywood that was already archaic and questionable, to begin with. Audiences and critics have higher expectations for films, especially in terms of inclusive storytelling. A nostalgic trip back to the kinds of stories on race relations where the general message is “can’t we all just get along” simply doesn’t fly in 2019.
In 1990, the Best Picture winner at the Oscars was Driving Miss Daisy, a film that is not unlike Green Book in terms of structure, tone, and intent. It took home top prize in the same year that Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing was released, a film that remains iconic and ground-breaking to this day but was notably not even nominated for Best Picture. As many scholars and critics from the time discussed, the dynamic created here by the Academy spoke volumes as to the kinds of stories they like to reward. Stories about the black experience in America have to be consumed through a white gaze, free of any truly radical ideas; this was not a unique phenomenon. It happened again for Spike Lee when his biography of Malcolm X was shut out of Best Picture. Change has been unfolding in the Academy as its membership has greatly diversified, but the Green Book nominations, all in spite of months of criticism and historical understanding, only further emphasizes how they still have a long way to go. It may not be the worst film nominated for Best Picture this year but Green Book winning the top prize would be a major nail in the coffin of the Academy’s relevance.
