Movie Review - Green Book

As I am preparing to get on my flight to Brussels, en-route to France as my final destination, I want to fit in one last task – buy movie tickets for my parents. I know they won’t treat themselves to this little luxury if I don't push them, and it is affordable enough for me to treat them on a bi-weekly basis. But even though I am the one who buys the tickets, it is usually my younger brother who makes the movie recommendations – I’m not a movie aficionado but my brother is and this time he recommends Green Book, all the way from Kyrgyzstan where he’s completing an international internship following his graduation from law school. I don’t have the time to read the synopsis so I click a few buttons and buy my parents the movie tickets.

Ten days later, the movie title comes up again. I’m sitting in a castle in a small village outside Paris. A group of us are huddled in the centre of a large-yet-unheated barn. An openly-gay professor who teaches Religion and Diplomacy in Chicago is hosting a break-out session and proposes a novel idea: what if we had a symbol to identify mosques, churches and synagogues that signify that worshipers of other religions are welcome to pray in these places of God. He mentions LGTBQ-friendly churches and the flag that signals their welcoming stance, and says, "Why not have mosques, synagogues and churches that welcome people of other faiths to come worship." “Oh you mean something like the Green Book!” one of the other participants exclaims. “Oh yes! Isn’t that movie in the theaters right now!” another responds. I finally make a connection to what the book maybe about, but I still do not have time to read the synopsis.

When I eventually return to Canada, I decide to spend the remaining two weeks at home with my parents in Mississauga. My mother has gone to visit her new granddaughter in Regina, so it’s just me and my father for now. I ask him what movie he would like to watch this day. Now, if there is anything you need to know about my father is that if he likes a movies, he *really* likes it. For instance, he has watched Kill Bill and Slumdog Millionaire upwards of 10 times! So, when he suggests that we watch Green Book again in theaters, I have come to conclude that we’ve got a new favorite movie in the family!

And that’s how I ring in the new year – by watching the Green Book on new year’s eve. I’m biased because I am partial to anything my father likes, but I too like Green Book. I especially appreciate how hard Don Shirley works to introduce a different mindset to Tony Vallelonga, a different way of being and moving through the world. I love the scene where Don Shirley breaks down as he expresses his lack of sense of belonging – not any more, but there was a significant portion of my life where I felt that I too did not belong because I as an immigrant, I was being exposed to environments that my parent’s had not been exposed to. The emotions he expresses in that scene take me back to the heart-wrenching pain I had often felt at leaving, or even returning, home just a few years ago. The scene where Don Shirley says “I thought you’d want this time to be an exception” hurts me more than I convey – and Tony Vallelonga’s response that “he knows it can be complicated” is the most compassionate sentence I have heard in a while. I surprise even myself when I get disappointed that Tony Vallelonga and Don Shirley chose not to play the last concert of the tour, thus forgoing their full pay cheque – and this speaks more to my sense of financial insecurity and how one can never really be impartial in matters of justice if the purse strings are controlled by someone else.

Edit: it was only after completing this blogpost that I came across a video on Facebook that spoke about white savior syndrome in movies. I never watched Green book from that perspective. Further more, the Facebook video stated that Don Shirley's siblings stated that Don Shirley was not estranged from the Black community, and had most certainly eaten fried chicken before. While this video and the information contained within it certainly takes away from my experience and opinion of the movie, I have not yet had enough time to form a critique or opinion of the film contents from this perspective. I guess I have to watch it a second time, while keeping this perspective in mind. But in the meanwhile, if you were interested in learning more about this critique, I'd redirect you to the Wikipedia entry on the topic of White savior narrative in films.