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In an Oscar season not wanting controversy, Green paper made the headlines as one of the nominees for the best controversial film. It is a healing film about healing the wounds of racism that saw not one, but two related controversies: the first when the star Viggo Mortensen dropped the atomic bomb during a question-and-answer session, then the revelation of Islamophobic tweets by co-author Nick Vallelonga.
These controversies are symptomatic of the film itself, a white savvy travel movie based on a true story that uses fried chicken as leitmotiv. While Mortensen and his co-star Mahershala Ali perform fantastic performances, the cast is pretty much all that the film is good at. In his way of treating everything, from the biography of one of the men at the heart of the film to the very nature of American racism, Green paper stumbles.
The film is a classic road story telling the story of Bronx bouncer Tony Bronel (Mortensen). In 1962, he found work as a driver and bodyguard for Dr. Donald Shirley (Ali), a strange black composer who was embarking on a dangerous concert tour. South. (Under his nickname, Tony Lip, the former bouncer would become a successful actor, the best known being Carmine, the boss of the Lupertazzi family, on The Sopranos.In the film, Tony teaches the pretentious classical musician to relax; Doc, as Tony calls him, in turn teaches his driver to be less racist. It's saccharine and predictable at the base, and he has won three Golden Globes, including Best Picture. Five more trophies are planned – including best-selling film, Best Actor for Mortensen, Best Supporting Actor for Ali and Best Original Screenplay – Sunday.
Getty ImagesAlfred Eisenstaedt
But the first sin of the film is just in his name. He gets his title from the NOTGreen Book of the Egro Travelerand yet gives this important piece of American history little analysis or time to the screen. The Green Paper was an annual guide published by Victor Hugo Green and his family between 1936 and 1966, listing hotels, petrol stations and restaurants in the country that would be welcoming to black visitors. Thousands of copies were sold each year to black travelers perfectly aware that even the most innocent of the journeys on the road left them plagued by racist humiliations ranging from denial of service to outright violence. In the movie, Tony flips through the book several times before landing Doc in some pretty shabby motels, something that the experts pointed out as being inaccurate that the true Green paper often guided travelers to upscale places. The film also suggests that the advice provided in Green's guide would only be needed in the South, while the book had actually started as a booklet suggesting hospital businesses in the author's city, New York.
This is not the only misleading representation of racism in the film. In one scene, a southern lawman interrupts Tony and Doc's car at night to get them out of the city, warning them that they were living in a "city at sunset" – a community that does not belong to the city. did not allow blacks to stay after dark. "The cities of Sundown were incredibly rare in the south" expert James W. Loewen said Politifact. "The white southerners thought that the cities of the sunset were stupid. Who would be good?
The accuracy of the two men's description of the film was also debated. Both are described as broad stereotypes; Tony is the Bronx tough guy, prone to occasional violence and often wears underwear. Doc is absurdly stuck, haughty to the point of being rude and quick to offer grammatical corrections. Nick Vallelonga, Tony's real son, co-wrote Green paper– and would presumably have vetoed, for example, the scene in which his father bends an entire pizza in half and toppled – Dr. Shirley's family did not have the opportunity to inform their parent's portrait; they were not consulted at all and condemned the film as inaccurate.
Universal images
Shirley's surviving brother, Dr. Maurice Shirley, described the film as a "symphony of lies" in an interview with Shadow and act. The film depicts Dr. Shirley, who, like her former chauffeur, died in 2013, as a man whose education and refinements place him at odds with the black community. He is indifferent to black music and uncomfortable with other African Americans. "I'm not accepted by my own people because I'm not like them," said Doc at one point in the film. His character is extremely isolated and the only mention his family receives is a reference to a single, separated brother.
But in 1962, Shirley actually had three brothers alive and his family said that during the tour described in the film, he was in regular contact with them. Not only that, but the family insists that Shirley was deeply rooted in the black community. He participated in the civil rights movement and was a friend of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., casual patient of Shirley's brother, physician, Dr. Edwin Shirley. He was friends with Duke Ellington and Sarah Vaughan, and participated in Dr. King's march on March on Selma.
"The character so superbly portrayed by Mahershala Ali was just not the uncle Donald I knew," wrote Edwin Shirley in an email to Time. "They made a popular film that had commercial success, but in the process, they distorted and diminished the lives of one of the two main characters.They undermined the integrity of life from Donald Shirley with events and insinuations that go against the man I knew. "
One of the biggest inaccuracies of the film is its description of racism as a result of individual ignorance of under-exposed white Americans, rather than a systematic pattern of deliberate iniquity. Here, racial hatred among white Northerners is a peccadillo that moves away quickly against the black genius. Over the course of the movie, Tony became a bigot who throws water glasses simply because black tinkers drank it became a man who – spoiler alert! – invites Doc to his home for his Christmas dinner. He found in himself to recognize the humanity of a man who was clearly his intellectual and professional superior, but we never find out what he now thinks of DIYers.
And in a film that pursues an easy message of racial harmony, one of her most fanatical currents is her suggestion that Shirley's refinements make him somehow a stranger to the black community. In fact, each of Shirley's three brothers were also doctors, and in the 1960s a burgeoning black upper class was populated by people who spoke many languages and enjoyed classical music. Although Dr. Shirley certainly has more talent than almost all of his contemporaries, the film's insistence that a black man who loves well cut suits, speaks Italian and who enjoys the opera very much French looks like an ufo is its most insidious. suggestion of all.
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