by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
On Friday, May 15 I ran
Charles a movie I’d been curious about for some time: Green Book, the 2018 Academy Award Best Picture winner and
quite a good film, though it winning Best Picture over the electrifying
masterpiece Black Panther is a similar miscarriage in Academy Award history to giving John Ford’s
How Green Was My Valley Best
Picture over Citizen Kane. I was especially upset with Green Book having beaten out Black Panther because Green Book was yet another example of a film that used the
African-American civil rights struggle mainly as a vehicle to redeem a bunch of
white people and get them to confront their inner racism and overcome it.
That’s a story that needs to be told, but can’t we have more films that
recognize Black people as the primary movers in this struggle — as did Ava
DuVernay’s Selma (another film that deserved the Academy recognition it
didn’t get: its only Oscar was for John Legend and Common for the great theme
song) and, albeit in a metaphoric way, did Black Panther. Green Book was directed by Peter Farrelly, who until now has been known almost
exclusively for gross-out comedies co-directed with his brother Bobby (his
first credit on imdb.com is Dumb and Dumber), and though Farrelly and Brian Hayes Currie get
co-writing credits the real inspiration for the film was the third writer, Nick
Vallelonga, who based it on a two-month tour his father Tony “Lip” Vallelonga
(Viggo Mortenson, who had to put on weight for the film to look like an
Italian-American living on the fringes of organized crime without actually
joining it) took as driver and overall factotum for the great African-American
pianist Don Shirley (Mahershala Ali — I was ready to write one of my usual
denunciations about casting directors who reach to Africa or Britain to find
actors to play African-Americans, but then I checked Ali’s listing on imdb.com and found he was actually
born in Oakland, California, U.S.A. in 1974!) on a two-month tour through the
Midwest and the South.
Needless to say, when the film begins Tony is a racist —
not an active one but one who’s absorbed and never questioned the prejudices of
his community and his time — so much so that when two Black workmen come to his
family’s apartment he takes the glasses they’ve drunk from and throws them
away, but his more sensible (and economical) wife Dolores (Linda Cardellini)
pulls them from the trash and washes them for reuse. At the same time virtually
all the popular music the Vallelongas listen to is Black R&B — the gag that
these bigoted people who throw the N-word around like confetti like Black
entertainers is run almost to death in this film, though between the R&B
records and music director Kris Bowers’ expert re-creation of Shirley’s piano
style this movie would have generated an excellent soundtrack CD. (As far as I
could tell, only one of the
pop records heard on the soundtrack as source music is by a white act: the Four
Seasons’ cover of “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town.”) But the film’s principal
gag is the irony that the Black protagonist is cultured, intelligent,
accomplished and multi-lingual (he’s referred to as “Dr. Don Shirley” because
he has three Ph.D.’s, in music,
psychology and liturgical studies) while the white guy is an unlettered
proletarian who can barely put a sentence together either in English or Italian (the
language of his forebears — and there’s one marvelous “face” moment when Tony
and his friends are conversing in Italian and Shirley starts speaking it,
essentially saying to Tony, “I know a lot more about your culture than you know about mine”). At one point
Shirley notices Tony writing a letter home to his wife, grabs the manuscripts,
critiques its grammar and spelling and starts writing his own letter in Tony’s persona — and I joked, “Now it’s Cyrano de Bergerac.”
The fish-out-of-water gags begin when, after an
opening sequence at the Copacabana night club in which there’s an altercation
involving a particularly persnickety Mafioso whose prized hat (it was a gift from his
now-deceased mom) is hijacked from the hat-check girl and this leads to a fight
in which Tony the bouncer gets involved and leads to the Mafioso punishing the Copacabana’s ostensible owner by
ordering the club closed (which it is, for two months, ostensibly for
“renovations” — many, if not
all, of New York’s fabled nightclubs in the 1940’s, 1950’s and 1960’s were
Mafia-owned and their ostensible “owners” were simply fronts for the Mob). This
in turn leads to a scary couple of months in which the Vallelongas are so
desperate for money Tony is willing to enter a hot-dog eating contest to win a
$50 bet (which he wins — in an imdb.com “Trivia” item Viggo Mortenson was
quoted about the high-fat, high-carb diet he had to go on to assume the real
Tony’s jumbo size and said that he had to maintain it seven days a week since
if he went back on the weekends to eating as he normally did, he’d lose so much
weight the costumes would be too large for him) before he gets a lead on a job
driving “Dr. Don Shirley” for two months. He shows up at the address he’s given
for his interview and finds out that it’s Carnegie Hall — Dr. Shirley lives on
an apartment in the Carnegie Hall building above the famous concert space — and
he’s ushered into Shirley’s living room, ornately decorated with real elephant
tusks and other bizarre items he’s been presented as gifts from his 1-percenter
friends over the years. He receives Tony sitting on a huge chair that looks
like a throne — and he’s wearing a white gown that makes him look more like an
African potentate than a working musician. As the tour progresses and descends
from the Midwest to the South and then the Deep South (the film’s title comes
from a guidebook written for Black tourists to let them know which hotels,
restaurants and other establishments were safe for them to use when driving
across the country, especially the South), the racism becomes more pronounced
and so does the gulf between the cultured, literate, intelligent Shirley and
the other Black people we see in the
movie, who drink, dance to R&B, shoot craps, eat fried chicken and do all
the other stereotyped things Tony thought all Black people did.
One scene that particularly
surprised me was the one in which Tony has to bail Shirley out of a YMCA where
he’s been caught in flagrante delicto with a white guy — was Don Shirley Gay or Bi? That was news to me; earlier he’d mentioned
having been married but said he and his wife broke up because as a working
musician he was constantly on the road (a story a lot of musicians have told — the PBS American
Masters show on B. B. King
featured an interview in which he mentioned that he’d gone through three marital breakups with women he loved but who
didn’t realize his career — and the constant touring he needed to do to sustain
it — came first), but this sequence throws us a curveball and suggests another
reason why Don Shirley’s marriage might have broken up. (It also raises a
question that’s fascinated a lot of jazz fans, including me: why have there been so few Gay jazz
musicians? A lot of the Black blues queens of the 1920’s were Bisexual,
including Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith, but of all the world-class
instrumentalists in jazz history I can think of only three, Bix Beiderbecke, Billy Strayhorn and Gary Burton, who were even remotely plausibly described as Gay or Bi — and
though Strayhorn’s sexuality was well known in the jazz world and Burton “came out” late in life, Bix’s Gay side
is described only by Ralph Berton, who claims Bix had an affair with Berton’s
Gay brother — though I believe it, if only because a lot of Gay men I have known have been guilt-ridden about
their sexuality and responded by becoming introverted and drinking heavily.)
One peculiarity about the script is it describes Don Shirley as fully aware of
the level of prejudice he’s going to encounter on this tour but also almost
suicidally reckless in his behavior — like the time he slips out of the
Black-only hotel he’s had to stay in and walks down the street to a white bar
just because he feels like having a drink and Tony has to get him out of a
situation in which three rednecks, one wielding a knife, are about to beat him
up at least and cut him up at worst. These bizarre quirks in Shirley’s nature
that turned him from the self-controlled man we see through most of the film to
the risk-running of these scenes, at best naïve and at worst idiotic, go
unexplained — as does his heavy drinking: in addition to insisting that he will
only play on Steinway pianos (apparently, according to his Wikipedia page,
because he simply liked their construction and action better than other brands,
though I wondered if he had an endorsement contract with Steinway the way
Liberace did with Baldwin), he insists that he have a bottle of Cutty Sark in
his hotel room every night, and when Tony asks him if he needs any “help”
drinking it, Shirley responds that he can do that perfectly well on his own.
One thing the film does make an
issue of is Shirley’s frustration that he really wanted a career as a solo classical pianist but
was forced to play jazz because there was too much institutionalized racism
both among the businesspeople and promoters running the classical music world
and among the music’s audiences for a career path in classical music to be
credible for an African-American. That caused me to start looking online to see
how many major musicians who are classical soloists are African-American — and
surprisingly there still aren’t
many. There have been a fair number of African-American classical singers, a smattering of conductors, and some highly
significant Black composers, but according to a 2013 post by Brian Wise of
radio station WQXR (https://www.wqxr.org/story/266404-timeline-history-black-classical-musicians/),
“While Blacks continue to play crucial roles in jazz, gospel,
R&B, hip-hop and other popular styles, hurdles remain in classical music.
Fewer than three percent of U.S. orchestral
musicians are Black. Opera has a greater concentration of Black
performers, though singers face their own set of
challenges in terms of casting. And when a concert series
highlights music by Black composers, it's often as part of Black History Month
or another special event.” There are at least two powerful moments in the film
that address this; in one, Tony tries to support Shirley as he laments that he
couldn’t have had a career in classical music: “Personally I think if you stuck
to the classic stuff it would’ve been a big mistake.” “A mistake?” says
Shirley. “Performing the music I trained my entire life to play?” “Trained?”
Tony throws back. “What are you, a seal? People love what you do! Anyone can
sound like Beethoven or Joe-Pan or them other guys you said. But your music,
what you do? Only you can do that!” To which Shirley replies, “Thank you, Tony.
But not everyone can play Chopin. Not like I can.” The other is a speech by
Shirley late in the film in which he laments that he’s not at home in either
the white or the Black communities:
“Yes, I live in a castle, Tony! Alone. And rich white people pay me to play
piano for them because it makes them feel cultured. But as soon as I step off
that stage, I go right back to being just another nigger to them. Because that
is their true culture. And I suffer that slight alone, because I’m not accepted
by my own people ’cause I’m not like them, either. So, if I’m not Black enough and if I’m not white enough and if
I’m not man enough, then tell me, Tony, what am I?”
Don Shirley’s Wikipedia
page describes the world of classical music as not as totally closed to him as
the film depicts: in 1945, at age 18, he played Tchaikovsky’s First Piano
Concerto with the Boston Symphony; a year later he played one of his own pieces
with the London Philharmonic; and in 1954 he was invited by Arthur Fiedler to
play with the Boston “Pops” Orchestra. The Wikipedia page claims that in 1955
Shirley played with the NBC Symphony Orchestra as the soloist in a piano
concerto by Duke Ellington — only Ellington never wrote a piano concerto; what
I suspect they meant was Ellington’s 1943 jazz tone poem “New World A-Comin’,”
a 12-minute work Ellington premiered at Carnegie Hall with his regular band and
Duke himself as the soloist — and according to a 1969 High Fidelity article by Duke’s friend Stanley Dance, even a
virtuoso like Shirley was thrown by some of Ellington’s idiosyncratic piano
writing. It’s interesting that Shirley’s trio, as depicted in the film (and in
real life), was not the
usual lineup for a pianist-led jazz trio (either piano-guitar-bass or
piano-bass-drums) but piano, bass and cello, lending the music a semi-classical air that was
actually fairly popular in the late 1950’s, when classical composer Gunther
Schuller coined the term “Third Stream Music” for his experiments in fusing
classical and jazz. (Others had tried that earlier: Paul Whiteman in the
1920’s, Artie Shaw in the 1930’s, Stan Kenton in the 1940’s.) Shirley made most
of his records for Archie Bleyer’s Cadence label, whose most famous artists
were AndyWilliams and the Everly Brothers, and it’s significant that Bleyer
thought Shirley had a potentially broad enough audience that he put his records
out on Cadence rather than his usual jazz label, Candid. The film ends with
Shirley and Tony getting arrested on their way to a concert in Birmingham,
Alabama — the writers actually used an incident from a later tour on which Tony drove for Shirley in which they
got arrested and Shirley literally called then-attorney general Robert Kennedy to pressure the governor of
Alabama to release him — followed by an incident in which Shirley walks out on
his Birmingham concert when the venue owners won’t let him eat at the
building’s restaurant, and he ends up at a Black juke joint playing the Chopin
“Winter Wind” etude on the bar’s house piano and then sitting in with the
R&B house band — thus establishing both his classical and Black “cred.”
It’s not
surprising that Green Book has been criticized for the usual dramatic inaccuracies — Mahershala
Ali apologized to Shirley’s surviving relatives for not having sought them out
for input before the film was made, since he’d bought into the script’s conceit
that Shirley had been out of touch with his family when the film’s events took
place, while jazz musicians like Quincy Jones who knew Shirley defended the
accuracy of the film’s portrayal and a tape of an old interview with Shirley
himself (he and Tony both died within two months of each other in 2013) in
which he described his relationship with Tony as more than the usual
employer-employee one: “I trusted him implicitly... You see... not only was
[Tony] my driver, we never had an employer/employee relationship. You don’t
have time for that bullshit. My life is in this man’s hands!... So you’ve got
to be friendly with one another.” Green Book is quite a good movie, probably better in its
parts than as a whole (I especially liked the part in one of Tony’s letters
home — before Shirley started writing them for him — in which he writes of
Shirley, “He don’t play like a colored piano player. He plays like Liberace,
only better”) but certainly an estimable piece of work. But seeing it also
heightened my resentment that the Academy gave the Best Picture Oscar to yet another movie in which it’s the function of the noble
Black supporting character (Ali actually won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor) to ennoble the whites and get them off
their racism instead of a film like Black Panther, written and directed by Black people and starring
the Black characters as powerful agents of their own liberation.
