This year's candy-coated movie about Jim Crow.Green Book is not as emotionally rousing as its predecessors (Hidden Figures, The Help, The Shape of Water), and this is to its credit.
Even more interestingly, Don Shirley is an intriguing, complex character who is explored beautifully by Mahershala Ali.
But... these kinds of movies drive me sort of nuts. We explore a very specific relationship between black folks and white folks within Jim Crow, and the positive aspects of these relationships allow us mostly to ignore the larger structures that subtend these personal relationships.
I was also really uncomfortable with the scene at the YMCA – I am not saying what it was since I don't want to spoil that aspect of the film's plot for anyone, but there is a sequence at a YMCA that Green Book deals with in a way that is typical of these kinds of candy-coated movies. Zoom in on the magic of this particular personal relationship, and then we can leave behind the real structural inequalities that exist. What this particular omission means for Green Book is that it fails to explore something that must've been very important to Don Shirley as a real person, glancing at it, instead, and perhaps using it as a kind of "key" to the character – an explanatory answer instead of a series of exploratory questions.
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