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It’s pure formula, of course. Two men—one white, one black—from polar opposite backgrounds with wildly contrasting personalities get thrown together under unusual circumstances. They learn from each other, change each other for the better and discover that—guess what?—they’re not so different after all.

“Green Book” is all that and more: It also takes place while the two men are driving across the American South during 1962, so it contains multiple formulas at once. It’s the mismatched-buddy road trip movie with a message about race relations, arriving in theaters at the height of awards season and the holidays, just in time to make us all feel better about the world—or at least give us a brief glimmer of hope during this period of political and ideological division. As an added bonus, it also happens to have been inspired by a true story.

But damned if it doesn’t work beautifully for nearly the entirety of its two hour-plus running time. “Green Book” is the kind of old-fashioned filmmaking big studios just don’t offer anymore. It’s glossy and zippy, gliding along the surface of deeply emotional, complex issues while dipping down into them just enough to give us a taste of some actual substance.

And its enjoyability comes almost completely from its starring performances from an excellent Viggo Mortensen and Mahershala Ali . Both actors imbue their roles with precision and pathos. They find nuance within their familiar types individually and share a spirited chemistry with each other. They are a joy to watch together from start to finish, even though you can tell from the beginning exactly how specific moments between them are going to play out by the end.

You may be surprised to learn that this conventional piece of classy, inspirational filmmaking comes from director and co-writer Peter Farrelly , a longtime standard bearer of lowbrow comedy alongside his brother, Bobby. It’s a rare opportunity for him to direct solo, and it may seem like a departure. But the Farrellys’ woefully underappreciated bowling comedy “ Kingpin ” features quite a few of the same sorts of opposites-on-a-road-trip themes, as well as the possibility for unexpected friendship. An underlying sweetness—and the need to be decent to others—quite frequently exists beneath the gross-out gags and bodily fluids that have been the brothers’ bread and butter for decades. And that’s certainly at the heart of “Green Book.”

In a racial flip of “ Driving Miss Daisy ,” nearly 30 years after that film won a handful of Oscars including best picture, “Green Book” features a white man serving as a chauffeur—and valet, and muscle, and all-around problem solver—to a black man. (That’s not to say the film is entirely free of icky white savior moments, but it does offer instances of Ali’s character rescuing Mortensen’s, as well.) The title comes from the travel guide of restaurants and motels blacks were allowed to frequent in the segregated South.

Mortensen’s chameleon-like abilities are on display here once more as he disappears into the role of Tony Vallelonga—or “Tony Lip,” as he’s best known among his fellow Italian-Americans in New York. (Tony’s son, Nick, co-wrote the vivid and affectionate script with Farrelly and Brian Hayes Currie .) A brash and affable lug of a guy with big appetites and an even bigger loyalty to his wife (a lovely Linda Cardellini ) and two young sons, Tony is content staying in the same section of the Bronx where he’s always lived. An ever-present cigarette dangles from his mouth as he mangles the English language. Working as a bouncer at the Copacabana nightclub and gambling here and there for extra cash, he remains just enough on the periphery of the mob to keep himself out of real danger. (In an early moment indicating his sense of right and wrong, he’d rather pawn his watch to make ends meet before Christmas than do a job for some fellas for easy money.)

But then, the possibility of employment comes his way that would allow him to provide real financial stability for his family, even though it would take him away from them for a couple of months. Ali’s Dr. Don Shirley, a world-class pianist, needs someone to drive him on a tour of cities across the Eastern Seaboard and the South, where he’ll perform in both concert halls and private homes. Shirley—or “ Doc ,” as Tony calls him—is everything Tony is not: educated, sophisticated, articulate, meticulous. And black. Tony may be a good guy, but he’s got some antiquated, misinformed ideas about African-Americans and more than a tinge of racism against them, as evidenced by his early reaction to a couple of plumbers working in his home. Clearly, all that is about to change.

Ali brings an elegance to the role but also a moving vulnerability. When we first see him in his ornately appointed apartment above Carnegie Hall, where he’s dressed in robes and jewels and he’s literally sitting on a throne above Tony to interview him for the job, it’s easy to assume he’s simply going to be condescending and persnickety. But Doc reveals shadings and complexity as the road trip progresses, and he hints at the inner torment that’s driven him to build a refined outer shell.

The main pleasure of “Green Book” comes from watching Tony and Doc banter as they make their way from town to town—trading small talk, getting to know each other and getting on each others’ nerves. Their distinct opinions on fried chicken and Little Richard , for example, defy traditional stereotypes. Quite often, their burgeoning friendship plays out exactly the way you expect it will. When Tony’s wife asks him to write her letters from the road, and he demurs out of embarrassment, you know it’s only a matter of time before Doc is helping him craft eloquent, romantic missives to send her.

But other scenes offer some surprises in the details through which they’re executed. This is especially true in the powerful piano performances (achieved with the help of a body double, although Ali’s graceful demeanor is convincing). They indicate the transformation occurring between the two men as well if not better than their dialogue, especially during the final show of the trip, where many of the movie’s ideas about race and identity wrap up in joyous, satisfying fashion. You may actually find yourself getting a bit choked up by the end, even though you’ve been on this journey countless times before.

Christy Lemire

Christy Lemire is a longtime film critic who has written for RogerEbert.com since 2013. Before that, she was the film critic for The Associated Press for nearly 15 years and co-hosted the public television series "Ebert Presents At the Movies" opposite Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, with Roger Ebert serving as managing editor. Read her answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire here .

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Film credits.

Green Book (2018)

Rated PG-13 for thematic content, language including racial epithets, smoking, some violence and suggestive material.

130 minutes

Viggo Mortensen as Tony Lip

Mahershala Ali as Don Shirley

Linda Cardellini as Dolores

Don Stark as Jules Podell

Sebastian Maniscalco as Johnny Venere

Tom Virtue as Morgan Anderson

Brian Stepanek as Graham Kindell

Joe Cortese as Joey Loscudo

• Peter Farrelly
• Nick Vallelonga
• Brian Hayes Currie

Cinematographer

• Sean Porter
• Patrick J. Don Vito
• Kris Bowers

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• Green Book builds a feel-good comedy atop an artifact of shameful segregation. Yikes.

The movie is named after guides published for black travelers in segregated America. But its spin is all Hollywood.

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Green Book took home three Golden Globe Awards on Sunday for Best Comedy, Best Screenplay, and supporting actor Mahershala Ali — and that’s hardly a surprise. A period piece that’s also a road trip movie and a buddy dramedy? Based on a true story? With two strong performances and a heartwarming message about overcoming prejudice? That ends at a Christmas celebration? Sign America up (or at least the Hollywood Foreign Press Association).

The film, directed by comedy veteran Peter Farrelly , stars Viggo Mortensen and Ali. It’s “inspired” by the true friendship of Tony Vallelonga, an Italian-American chauffeur/bodyguard from the Bronx, and Don Shirley, the black pianist Vallelonga is hired to drive and protect on a concert tour through the deep South in 1962. It’s often funny, with some poignant moments and a heart that feels like it’s in the right place.

Yet curiously, the Green Book itself doesn’t play much of a role in the film. Mortensen’s character, Tony, takes it on the trip and leafs through it several times. Early on, he briefly explains its purpose to his wife Delores (Linda Cardellini): to provide black travelers with information about “safe” places to stay and to eat while they travel. He’ll need to refer to it to do his job, getting Shirley from gig to gig safely throughout the musician’s eight-week tour.

But after that, the book is not mentioned by name, even as the pair encounter the full gamut of racism during the trip — ranging from casual remarks to “genteel” discrimination to violent hostility from civilians, bar patrons, and police. Indeed, we typically see it only when Tony quietly picks it up to find motels in which Shirley can safely stay.

When Farrelly took the stage to accept the Golden Globe for Best Comedy or Musical, he used the opportunity to reiterate the film’s themes (and demand that the orchestra not play him off):

Green Book is a story of a trip that — [ to the orchestra ] please, no, turn that off. No, go away. Off. Okay. This is a story of the trip that Don Shirley took in the pre-Civil Rights era of the 1960s. Don Shirley was a great man and underappreciated genius who couldn’t play the music he wanted to play, simply because of the color of his skin. Yet he went on to create his own music that still resonates to this day. ... This story, when I heard it, gave me hope, and I wanted to share this hope with you. Because we are still living in divided times, and that’s what this movie is for: It’s for everybody. If they can find common ground here, we all can. All we have to do is talk and to not judge people by their differences, but look for what we have in common. And we have a lot in common. We all want the same thing: We want love and happiness and want to be treated equally. And that’s not a bad thing.

Farrelly’s speech is of a piece with the film’s approach to racism, common to Hollywood films, which is to suggest that relationships between individuals will heal centuries of racism. And indeed, Green Book ’s treatment of racism is uneven at best. In an early scene, for instance, Tony throws away two drinking glasses that black construction workers used in his kitchen, suggesting he draws a hard line about even coming into contact with black people. But a movie like this needs a “likable” hero, and after that moment, he doesn’t engage in such blatantly offensive behavior for the rest of the film. As an Italian American, Tony would have experienced plenty of discrimination himself, but the film only hints at it.

But even setting aside the characters’ development, for a movie named Green Book , it’s light on details about the actual, well, Green Book. It also seems to imply that such a guide was only really necessary in the Deep South, which rang false to me. Watching it, I worried that the screenplay — written by Farrelly, Brian Hayes Currie, and the real-life Tony’s son, Nick Vallelonga, who clearly drew on his father’s remembrance of the trip — might have glossed over the reality experienced by black Americans like Shirley.

But before seeing the movie, I didn’t know much about the Green Book itself, so I dug into its history to learn more. What I learned helped me see the ways in which Green Book doesn’t go nearly far enough in confronting its subject, and winds up trivializing serious matters as a result.

Here are four things I learned about the Green Book, and what it says about Green Book .

If you were a black American in the middle of the 20th century, you almost certainly knew about the Green Book

For middle-class Americans in the 1930s, the newfound availability of safe, affordable automobiles was not just a matter of convenience. It meant new possibilities, the ability to travel around the country at their leisure, without relying on anyone else. That was also true for African Americans, even in a country that was legally segregated in some places and functionally segregated virtually everywhere else.

But while white travelers could move with relative freedom, stopping into restaurants, bars, entertainment establishments, and places of lodging as they pleased, road travel was more fraught for African Americans. Staying in the wrong hotel, or trying to eat at the wrong establishment, could get you kicked out or much worse.

The Negro Motorist Green Book wasn’t the only travel book aimed at black motorists in America, but it was the most popular. It was created by Victor Hugo Green, an African-American mail carrier who lived in Harlem and worked in nearby Hackensack, New Jersey. Green worked on the project for three decades, from 1936 to 1966, shortly after the Civil Rights Act was signed into law, with a break during World War II for about four years. The Green Book swiftly became the most vital document for black travelers in America, detailing places where they could eat, drink, and spend the night without being harassed or worse.

Twenty-two editions of the Green Book (and one supplement), published from 1937 to 1966, have since been collected and digitized by the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library. “From what I can tell, [Green] had a car, he was very interested in cars, and he decided to create a travel guide that helped black travelers, or black motorists, be able to take advantage of the newfound freedom of having a car,” Maira Liriano, the chief librarian and curator of the center’s Green Book collection, told me.

The Green Books were mostly devoted to options for lodging and dining, but they contained other information too. “There were listings for rest stops, restaurants, barber shops, beauty shops,” Liriano says. And in some towns, especially smaller ones, no hotel would offer lodging to black people. For many of those, the Green Book listed “tourist homes,” which Liriano describes as “sort of like a precursor to Airbnb.” Black homeowners, mostly in the South, would rent a room in their home to black travelers looking for somewhere to spend the night.

That was especially important in so-called “sundown towns,” which passed laws designed to drive black people out of town that prohibited them from being on the road at night. One such town is depicted in Green Book .

Sundown towns weren’t specifically mentioned in the Green Book. But there were about 10,000 sundown towns in the US as late as the 1960s, and not just in the South : Levittown, New York; Glendale, California; and most Illinois municipalities were among their number. And while it could be dangerous to be on the road at night, it could be equally dangerous to check into the wrong hotel. In an age where you couldn’t just whip out your phone and look up Yelp reviews — and in which you could literally risk your life by being in the wrong part of town with the wrong skin color — you needed a guide.

So if you were traveling while black, you knew about the Green Book, because you had to, for your own safety. In his 2000 memoir A Colored Man’s Journey through 20th Century Segregated America , Earl Hutchinson Sr. (believed to be the oldest black American to publish a memoir, at age 96), wrote that “the Green Book was the bible of every Negro highway traveler in the 1950s and the early 1960s. You literally didn’t dare leave home without it.”

In the film, Shirley never mentions or even looks at the Green Book — only Tony interacts with it. In fact, the Shirley character in the film seems to have consciously distanced himself from many elements of black culture, while remaining richly aware of the discrimination he will encounter on the trip. But in real life, Shirley had previously traveled throughout the country before embarking on his tour with Tony, and would almost certainly have known all about the Green Book. It simply wouldn’t have been safe not to.

The Green Book was necessary no matter which part of the country you were traveling through

Green Book depicts a range of ways in which the racist attitudes that were dominant in American life in the early and mid-20th century manifested themselves, from snide comments and racial epithets to outright hostility. But it strongly suggests that a guide like the Green Book was only really necessary in the Deep South, where under Jim Crow laws, segregation was not just encouraged, but legally enforced.

The first time Tony consults the Green Book comes after several stops on Shirley’s concert tour, in Ohio and Indiana. Once they cross into Kentucky, the Green Book becomes his guide, and we see it in his hands and on the car seat beside him several times. And a key scene near the end of Green Book suggests that while Shirley was harassed and worse by police in the South, once they returned north of the Mason-Dixon line, he was safe from that experience.

But the reality was different.

Victor Green himself lived in Harlem, a predominantly black neighborhood in New York City, and his first Green Book covered mostly the New York metropolitan area. “It was very much a local guide that listed auto repair shops, but also places in the suburbs, like nightclubs and restaurants,” Liriano told me. “It was highlighting businesses that were friendly and open, and that would be of interest, to the African American motorist.”

But interest in the book was high, and subsequent editions expanded very rapidly. “In two years, they included pretty much the whole country,” Liriano said.

That meant the Green Book didn’t restrict its listings to places like Georgia and Alabama, or other states with explicit Jim Crow laws — it was a lifeline for travelers virtually anywhere in the country.

In the 1962 edition of the Green Book , published the year in which Green Book is set, you can find listings for restaurants in Wilmington, Delaware; hotels in Billings, Montana; entertainment establishments in Seattle, Washington; and antique stores in New York City, all of which were friendly to black clientele. In many editions, listings spilled over US borders into Mexico and Canada, going as far north as Alaska. And in every city where establishments were listed as friendly to black travelers, there were almost certainly establishments that were unfriendly.

“In states that didn’t necessarily have laws on the books, there was definitely a custom to discriminate,” Liriano said. “The country was pretty much very racist, everywhere you went.”

Certainly, black travelers experienced different conditions in places where segregation was legal and where it wasn’t, and conditions varied across the north as well. In his 1998 memoir Walking With the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement , Rep. John Lewis (D-GA), a Civil Rights pioneer, writes about a 17-hour road trip he took with his Uncle Otis in 1951, packing their lunches and carefully plotting which bathrooms were safe to use along the way from Alabama to upstate New York. “It wasn’t until we got to Ohio that I could feel Uncle Otis relax, and so I relaxed, too,” he writes, later recounting his amazement that his relatives in Buffalo had “white people living next door to them. On both sides.”

But there was no magical line that a black traveler could cross to find safety on the other side. “I think that’s the part that maybe people don’t think about as much,” Liriano told me. “You can blame the South for their laws; but the North was very much also a very segregated place with spaces that were white and spaces that were black, even though it wasn’t by law.”

What the Green Books omitted is as significant as what they contained

Green Book does well in illustrating how Shirley adapts his behavior to be more acceptable to the mostly white crowds who gather to hear him play, even though, as he knows, once he leaves the stage he’s back to being just another “Negro” in their eyes.

His strained, pained smile at the end of every stage set is the dead giveaway. It’s a stark reminder of the long American tradition of respectability politics . And the film is at its best when Tony and Shirley are discovering the limits of those politics, and learning how to challenge the white-defined status quo.

Some of the need to watch one’s step was reflected in the Green Books, which were intended for black readers but required broader support to remain in production. “Green had to collaborate with a lot of people, including the federal government’s travel bureau,” Liriano says. In interacting with the “Negro Affairs” office in that bureau, as well as other collaborators like gas and oil companies, Green often wound up working with other African-Americans.

But knowing that he needed the support of the government and various companies to keep producing this vital lifeline, Green tended to not rock the boat too much. “He’s not going to criticize or blatantly state things,” Liriano said. “You sort of have to read between the lines in a lot of what he writes in the Green Books.”

That meant not outright criticizing the very laws, customs, and racist attitudes that made 30 years of Green Books necessary. It also appears to have meant not identifying sundown towns.

Still, the sadness inherent in the very existence of the Green Books came through. The end of the introduction to the 1949 edition made this clear. After thanking the United States Travel Bureau’s “Negro Affairs” office for their support, and asking readers to send their feedback and mention the book to establishments that might want to be listed, Green concludes:

There will be a day sometime in the near future when this guide will not have to be published. That is when we as a race will have equal opportunities and privileges in the United States. It will be a great day for us to suspend this publication for then we can go wherever we please, and without embarrassment.

“But until that time comes we shall continue to publish this information for your convenience each year,” he writes.

It’s inherently disingenuous to cite the Green Books in the title of a feel-good film

The Green Books were Green’s effort to make the best of a terrible situation, and to offer some kind of freedom to a wide swath of the American population who were considered inferior to white people, not worthy of being treated as equals. In America, barely more than a half century ago, it was legal in some places to be hounded off the road because of your skin color, or to be turned away by a “No Negroes Allowed” sign in a hotel lobby.

In 2010, Lonnie Bunch, director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, told the New York Times that the Green Book “allowed families to protect their children, to help them ward off those horrible points at which they might be thrown out or not permitted to sit somewhere. It was both a defensive and a proactive mechanism.”

So as much as they’re a triumph of ingenuity and hard work, the Green Books represent something else: decades of great pain, and a history which ought to be regarded with shame.

That’s ultimately why Green Book feels wrongheaded to me, no matter how well-intentioned: The movie clearly exhibits Hollywood’s unfortunate tendency to elide reality when making movies about historical racism. It takes the name of an important artifact of history, one whose very existence was a result of prejudice and entrenched white supremacy, and makes it the basis for a broad comedy. It centers its story on a goofy, lovable white man who learns to be less racist after spending time with a black man who, though he’s aloof and unlikeable at first, becomes more “sympathetic” after he’s beaten up a few times.

And curiously, the two never talk about the Green Book itself — its history, its necessity, its very existence. Green Book ’s end credits show pictures of the two men and briefly explain what happened to Tony and Shirley after the tour, but never show or even mention the actual Green Books. That’s a bafflingly missed opportunity, given the very name of the film.

It also leans into the always-present danger that comes with movies about racism set in the past. They give audiences — particularly white ones that are eager to consider our era “post-racial” or “color-blind,” or who think black people keep pulling out the “race card” — the ability to leave the theater saying, Whew, the 1960s were a crazy time. Glad we fixed racism!

To be sure, there are a few scenes in which the movie overcomes this setup, to say something real about how expectations based on race, class, and identity can wreak havoc on a person’s soul. And at its best, Green Book may raise interest in the actual Green Books among viewers, particularly white audiences who’ve never heard of them before.

But borrowing the name of such a fraught piece of history and making a feel-good comedy about it, then failing to do that piece of history justice, is at best a misstep. At worst, it’s yet another example of Hollywood’s obliviousness and its willingness to feed into its audience’s self-satisfaction. As a piece of conventional Hollywood cinema, Green Book has plenty to recommend it. But as a film named for Victor Green’s books, it’s got a lot to answer for.

Green Book opens in limited theaters on November 16 and wide on November 21.

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Review by Brian Eggert October 24, 2018

Green Book pairs a tough Italian-American chauffeur with a Jamaican-born pianist from high society in a road movie that ventures into the pre-integration South of 1962. Based on a true story, the buddy comedy plays like a role reversal of Driving Miss Daisy (1989), except funnier and far less content with itself as lighthearted fare. Viggo Mortensen and Mahershala Ali star, their odd-couple characters clashing on issues of race and class to sometimes hilarious, sometimes sobering effect. And while it might be tempting to dwell on its director—Peter Farrelly, one half of the Farrelly brothers team that made Dumb and Dumber (1994) and There’s Something About Mary (1998)—to sell the movie’s humor and entertaining performances, there’s a streak of historical outrage exposed in this Universal release. The open racial intolerance depicted in the movie reflects a time not long ago when a well-educated, supremely talented, and wealthy person of color traveling through the South was subject to danger. If Green Book seems to naively behave as if such racism has disappeared, it at least offers a worthy message about the importance of having empathy for those outside of your immediate cultural sphere, regardless of their race, sexuality, or religion.

Fresh off his Oscar for Moonlight (2016), Ali plays Dr. Don Shirley, a prodigy with doctorates in psychology, music, and liturgical arts; he speaks several languages and can play Chopin or Tchaikovsky better than anyone; and he holds himself in high esteem, first appearing onscreen in regal silk, gold jewels, and seated on a throne inside his apartment above Carnegie Hall. For a planned eight-week concert tour that will take his trio, including his bassist (Mike Hatton) and cellist (Dimiter Marinov), on the road from New York to the Deep South, he requests the services of a driver who also functions as a bodyguard. Enter Tony Vallelonga (Mortensen), a Bronx native and Copacabana bouncer with tested skills as an enforcer. Tony also harbors an ingrained prejudice against African Americans, evidenced in a scene when his loving wife Dolores (Linda Cardellini) offers two Black plumbers a glass of lemonade. Tony reacts by dropping the empty glasses in the garbage, a response that Dolores remains opposed to yet muted about, despite rescuing the drinkware. Nevertheless, Tony accepts the job, given the lucrative pay and Shirley’s promise that they’ll return by Christmas.

Underneath the 30 pounds he put on to play the role, Mortensen plays Tony as an amusing blend of goombah street smarts and cultural unworldliness. After his turn in Captain Fantastic (2016), it’s a pleasure to see the actor flexing his rarely used comic muscles again. The script by Nick Vallelonga, Brian Currie, and Farrelly makes almost every line out of Tony’s mouth a potent one, whether he’s demonstrating his narrow perspective, successfully conning someone, or boasting about his victory in a hot dog-eating contest (Tony’s voracious appetite is a running gag, riotously punctuated in a scene where he picks up an entire pizza, folds it like a taco, and begins to chow down). People in his neighborhood call him “Tony Lip” because he’s a hustler—or “bullshitter” to use his word—capable of convincing others to do things they don’t want to do. There’s a scene where Tony, astounded that Shirley has never tried KFC—“But your people love fried chicken,” he says—convinces his erudite employer to eat finger food. Shirley, meanwhile, tries to impart upon Tony a sense of ethical responsibility rooted in personal dignity, far removed from Tony’s street rules, as demonstrated in a scene where Shirley confronts Tony for stealing a rock from a roadside vendor.

The relationship that develops between “Doc,” as Tony calls him, and the thick-headed driver becomes a clash of, and personal education in, racial preconceptions and class ideology. Doc demands that Tony stop smoking in his presence and work on his diction before speaking in front of their preeminent clientele. “If people don’t like the way I talk they can go take a shit,” replies Tony. But the pianist proves that his upper-class identity has isolated him from any knowledge about Black culture. Doc plays for the wealthiest and most exclusive white audiences in America, but he knows nothing of Chubby Checker, Sam Cooke, Little Richard, or Aretha Franklin. He considers himself above such things, whereas Tony’s experiences in a New York nightclub have left him versed in and unfazed by certain perspectives, such as the revelation of Doc’s sexuality. At the same time, Doc’s tour of the south is revealed to be a self-imposed test to learn about prejudice, and the lessons range from belligerent traffic stops to appalling, if not unexpected behavior from his superficially elevated white hosts. In some cases, Doc requires that Tony comes to the rescue; later, he makes a stand for himself. Predictably, both characters learn a lot about themselves and each other and become great friends in the process. And then there’s the issue of room and board, which is a decided problem for Doc when traveling below the Mason-Dixon line and “no coloreds allowed” signs become commonplace.

The book mentioned in the movie’s title is based on both Victor Hugo Green’s  The Negro Motorist Green Book , as well as  Travelguide (Vacation and Recreation Without Humiliation ), two guidebooks published between the 1930s and 1950s, designed to aide Black drivers toward welcoming restaurants, roadside lodging, and automotive services. The ideal of the open road as a free public space was a symbol of American freedom after World War II and during the Cold War. Mobility on the public road without obstruction was a romantic conception of America, but it was also a fallacy, as African Americans traveling by car on city streets or state and federal highways might find themselves pulled over by police, or maybe a gang of racist white locals, for no reason whatsoever except the color of their skin. These guidebooks were symbols of Black immobility and remained in circulation in the Jim Crow South well into the 1960s, during a period when people of color in the south lived on the margins of freedom, caught between their enslaved past and the promise of something better. And the simple right to move about without persecution, although seemingly improved in the last fifty years, remains in question given today’s rate of police shootings and traffic stops involving African Americans.

Like other accessible period movies that expose and condemn racism, such as The Help (2014) or Hidden Figures (2016), Green Book treats its subject as though such events occurred in the distant past. Production designer Tim Galvin and costumer Betsy Heiman deliver a convincing portrait of the United States in the 1960s, and director of photography Sean Porter shoots the movie in pale colors that reflect the period’s temporal distance from today. The filmmakers make it seem like another world, whereas the reality is Black immobility has not yet been eradicated. Consider a sequence in which Tony and Doc find themselves pulled over in Mississippi, and the abrasive small-town cop throws them in jail after a hostile interaction. The audience can watch this scene and thank goodness for the end of sundown laws, but that doesn’t mean the problem of racism or racial profiling in traffic stops has disappeared. And so, it’s curious but not without reason that Farrelly’s movie should open the same year as BlackKklansman , Blindspotting , The Hate U Give , and Monsters and Men —all post-1960s movies that involve white police officers either shooting or becoming violent with people of color.

Green Book is a crowd-pleaser, and so watching it with a large audience is both essential for its maximum effect but revealing, depending on the audience. A movie theater packed with attuned viewers enhances our emotional reaction. Perhaps because the full house at the opening night screening of the Twin Cities Film Festival so thoroughly, and vocally, enjoyed the movie, I did too. When everyone’s laughing around you, you can’t help but laugh a little more than you might otherwise. It’s one of the essential benefits of cinema as a communal experience, and it’s how Green Book should be seen. But there’s also a downside. When characters engage in humor that’s not politically correct, and the predominantly white, bourgeois audience feels perhaps too comfortable, their laughter can become somewhat troubling. As viewers chuckled at the use of outdated epithets, the response forced me to wonder whether they were laughing because they follow a so-called color-blind racial ideology, because such words make them feel awkward, or worst of all because they think such words are funny. It’s a difficult distinction to identify in the midst of a packed moviehouse. But I can safely say there were more genuine laughs than vocal recoils or uncomfortable laughter, which was disconcerting.

Nevertheless, when the movie isn’t testing how comfortable its audience is with public racial discourse and racial humor, it presents a tender and enjoyable hunk of Oscar-bait. Tears will be shed, laughs will be had, and crowds will love it. The viewer might not always feel good about how those reactions are achieved; despite the overwhelming feel-goodness of the experience, you can see Green Book ’s gears operating. It tackles important issues without revealing the vile extent of racial hatred that occurred in the south at this time. It bears a modern-day relevance that seems to address certain political leaders with hopeful lines like “dignity always prevails.” And it’s airy enough that the viewer leaves feeling unscathed, generally pleased by the experience, and with some basic notions about social justice to consider. Above all, Ali and Mortensen give layered performances that may exist in a conventional brand of Hollywood moviemaking about race, class, and identity, but nonetheless manage to engage the viewer for over two hours.

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Arts and Entertainment

‘Green Book’: a guide to shattering stereotypes

Universal Studios

Chihiro H. (10) May 30, 2019

It’s the year 1962. Colored with soft pistachio greens and mellow yellows, “Green Book” presents the story of the real-life relationship between Tony “Lip” Vallelonga and Dr. Don Shirley as they travel alongside each other in a cramped car across the Southern States. However, beneath the light, road trip-like atmosphere of the movie, “Green Book” spotlights the racism, injustice, and prejudice in the US merely 60 years ago. Renowned comedy director Peter Farrelly creates a breakthrough masterpiece, breaking stereotype after stereotype.

Based on his father’s true story, screenplay writer Nick Vallelonga spins the unlikely tale of how those with different ethnic backgrounds, Italian and African-American, can become great friends over time. What makes “Green Book” so unique and unforgettable is how the stereotypes of the “white” man and “black” man are switched: where other mainstream, Hollywood films typically feature the African-American as less educated and the “white” man as the wealthy and privileged, “Green Book” is the complete opposite. Here we follow the story of the sly, uneducated and ever-talking Italian hitman, Tony, as he is employed as a driver by intellectual piano expert Dr. Shirley. Director Farrelly elegantly uses the contrast in the atmosphere between different scenes to shock the audience as they realize just how unpredictable, demoralizing and unfair life could be to people of color.

The difference in the intellectual levels of the two men and flipped stereotypes create situational irony, such as when the viewers laugh at comical scenes where Dr. Shirley helps the hopelessly illiterate Tony write love letters to his wife. These scenes, added with Tony’s idle chit-chat and the backgrounds of rolling countryside, create a light atmosphere, which is very pleasant to watch.

However, “Green Book” also presents jaw-droppingly shocking racism, whereas simple an act as going into a bar could result in harsh beatings and unjustified police arrests. These scenes are often matched with dark nights, dirty alleyways, creating a feeling of uncertainty and opens the eyes of the audience as they feel as if they themselves are the subject of this ridiculous racism.

However, these harsh scenes are responsible for changing Tony’s backward view of African-Americans, whilst also changing our views as the audience of the movie. Beyond a doubt, “Green Book” has the eccentric ability to touch the audience’s emotions and morals: it presents a startling look at a real story of the injustices that people of color had to experience and how even Tony, who previously threw away the cups which were used by African-Americans, can change into a man who would protect and care for African-Americans.

We must also do the same, to look beyond what seems to divide us and instead, search for what unites us.

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‘The Breakfast Club’: a story that never goes stale

by Peter Farrelly

Green book summary and analysis of part 1.

At the Copacabana Club in New York City, people gather around candlelit tables, and Bobby Rydell is singing with a big band. Tony "Tony Lip" Vallelonga is a doorman and bouncer at the club and shows people to their seats. He accepts a tip from some patrons as Bobby Rydell begins to sing. A cigarette girl takes cigarettes and cigars around to various tables, while an older man taps along.

A man named Mr. Loscudo brings his hat and coat to the coatcheck girl, telling her the hat is very special and needs to be guarded closely, as it was a gift from his mother. Nearby, Tony hears this exchange, and when Mr. Loscudo goes to talk to a manager, Carmine, handing him a hefty tip, Tony asks the coatcheck girl to give him Loscudo's hat and gives her some money to do so.

In the club, a fistfight breaks out, and the man tapping along to the music calls for Tony Lip, who runs to break up the fight, punching one of the men and dragging the other out to the street, and punching him several more times after the man tries to enter the club again. He gets blood all over his white shirt.

The scene shifts and we Loscudo livid and screaming about his missing hat. "I don't get my hat, I'll burn the Copa down!" he screams. Outside, someone hangs a sign that says that the Copacabana is closing for renovations, and Tony bemoans the fact that he's going to have to go back to driving garbage trucks to make a living.

The old man who was sitting at the table alone comes outside and tells Tony to take him home, and Tony obliges.

As Loscudo sits around a table gambling, Tony comes in and throws the hat on the table, claiming that he tracked down the missing hat. When Loscudo hands him a tip, Tony feigns humility, but Loscudo insists and tells him to call him Gio.

Back in the Bronx, Tony parks in front of a fire hydrant, putting a garbage can over the fire hydrant to disguise his parking violation. Inside, he takes a bottle of milk out of the fridge and takes a swig. In his kids' room, he kisses them in their beds and climbs into his own bed nearby, next to his wife, Dolores. "Good morning," she says, to which he responds, "Good night."

That day, Tony comes into his living room to find a group of men, family members, watching a baseball game. When Tony asks why they're there, one of the men points out that there are two black men there fixing the sink and they want to make sure she's safe.

Looking into the kitchen, Tony notices that Dolores has given the repairmen glasses of lemonade. After she walks the men out, Tony goes into the kitchen and throws the two glasses in the trash.

The family gathers around the table for a meal and Dolores mentions that Tony needs a job. One of the men says that Tony should have never punched the foreman at his job at the Sanitation Department. "He shouldn't have woke me up," Tony jokes.

In the kitchen, Dolores finds the glasses in the trash and shakes her head. One of the men takes Tony to a diner and they talk to a man named Paulie who wants to see if Tony will enter into a hot dog eating competition on a bet. Tony agrees and enters the hot dog eating contest against Paulie.

After, he returns home and tells Dolores that Paulie bet him $50 that he could eat more hot dogs, and then ate 24 hot dogs in the competition. He then tells his wife that he ate 26 and hands her $50. The phone rings, and it's Jules, the older man from the club, who tells him that they got a call from a doctor looking for a driver, and gives him the address for Carnegie Hall.

Tony goes to Carnegie Hall and goes into the large theater, where a manager directs him upstairs to Dr. Shirley's apartment. Outside the apartment, two older men wait for an interview. When an assistant, Amit , comes out, Tony tells him who he is, and Amit gives him a form to fill out while he waits.

Amit brings Tony into Dr. Shirley's apartment, an ornate and formal sitting room with tasseled lamps, fine leather chairs, and elephant tusks that Tony squints at. Don Shirley comes out in a robe and greets Tony, before sitting down to interview him.

Tony expresses some confusion about the nature of the job and tells Don that he was a garbage truck driver and that he used to drive his boss home every night. Don asks Tony what he did at the clubs he has worked at, and Tony cryptically tells him, "Public relations."

Don then tells Tony that he's not a medical doctor, but a concert pianist who will be traveling to the Midwest and the South to do a tour. When he asks Tony if he would have any trouble working for a black man, Tony tells him that he and his wife had a few "colored guys" over to his house for drinks—an obvious lie. Don tells Tony that the job will require him to be away from his family for eight straight weeks until Christmas.

Tony asks how much it pays, and Don tells him it will be $100 a week plus room and board. At this point, Don makes it clear to Tony that it will not just be the work of a chauffeur, but that he will also require that Tony take care of his itinerary, be an assistant, and take care of his clothes and shoes. At this, Tony balks, insulted to be asked to do such work for a black man, stands and says, "Good luck, Doc," before starting to leave the room. Before Tony can leave, Don tells him that several people recommended him for the job for his "innate ability to handle trouble."

Tony tells Don squarely that he is not a butler, but he would be happy to act as a chauffeur, before adding that he would charge $125. "Or go hire that little Chink just pranced out of here. See how far you get," he says, referring to an Asian man who he saw in the hall. "Thank you for stopping by," Don says, and Tony leaves.

At a bar later, the bartender tells Tony that a man named Augie was asking after him, and that he is in a booth in the corner of the bar. Tony goes over to the booth, which has a curtain, and climbs inside, where a group of mobsters are eating. Augie asks Tony about his fight with the man at the Copa, and asks if Tony wants to earn some extra money working for the mafia. "What I gotta do?" Tony asks, to which Augie replies, "Things."

Tony declines and goes to pawn his watch. The man behind the counter gives him 50 and tells him that if he gives him 60 by New Years' he can have the watch back.

At home, Dolores asks about the interview with Don and he explains that he was not a real doctor, but a pianist. When he tells Dolores that Don is black, Dolores says, "You wouldn't last a week with him."

The next morning, the phone rings, and Tony answers, half awake. It's Don calling, and he wants to talk to Dolores. When she picks up, he makes sure that she's okay with her husband being away for two months. When she hangs up, she tells Tony that he got the job and that Don will pay him $125 a week. Tony notices that she seems sad, and assures her that it will be okay.

The next day, two men from the record company give Tony the first half of his pay and say that he'll get the second half when it's over. "We got to have some guarantee you're gonna finish the job," the man says and hands him keys to a car and a guide book, called "The Negro Motorists' Green Book " that explains which hotels and restaurants are amenable to black people.

Tony says goodbye to his two sons and Dolores. Before he leaves, Dolores makes him promise to write her letters on the road, even though he's embarrassed about his writing. He hands her the check, the first half of his pay, and she hands him a bag of sandwiches for him and Dr. Shirley. They kiss goodbye and she tells him to be home in time for Christmas.

The film lands the viewer immediately in the glitzy but underhanded world of the Copacabana Club, where wealthy Italian-Americans come to wine and dine. As Bobby Rydell sings a jubilant song with a big band, patrons hand members of the staff hefty tips for small tasks. The world of the club is one of near-constant exchange, and just below the surface of the glittery facades is a less-than-savory mafia ethic, in which crimes can easily get paid off and smiles cover up unethical dealings.

While he is not part of this world from the inside, Tony Vallelonga , the protagonist, knows how to play the game. For instance, he accepts tips with a smile and even goes so far as to steal a wealthy patron's most beloved hat in hopes that he will receive an even heftier tip for its return. He understands the ways that mobsters think and plays the game to get ahead. Additionally, he is portrayed as a man who is acquainted with doing the dirty work when he needs to, as highlighted by the sequence in which he breaks up the fist fight in the club by punching one of the fighters, blood splattering all over his white shirt.

Racial tensions come to light early on, when we see the way the Italian-American men view black men in the Bronx. When Tony finds a group of men over at his apartment, they tell him they're there to make sure that Dolores is safe from the repairmen, and after the black repairmen have fixed the Vallelonga's sink and had something to drink, Tony throws away their glasses, an act of prejudice. Early on, the film establishes that the white characters, and Tony in particular, are bigoted.

Tony and Don Shirley could not contrast with one another much more. In addition to their different racial backgrounds, they come from markedly different classes, Tony an ex-garbage truck driver struggling to make ends meet for his family, and Don a wealthy and well-educated concert pianist who lives in a gold-covered apartment above Carnegie Hall. Where Don speaks in a measured, thoughtful, and formal tone, Tony is crass and coarse, speaking casually and at times rudely. The difference between them is pronounced.

Even though they are an unlikely pair, Dr. Shirley recognizes that Tony is the best man for the job and offers it to him. Tony is coarse and demonstrably racist, but this does not seem to matter to the proper Dr. Shirley, who prioritizes bulk over brains for the job of his chauffeur. With the approval of Dolores, Don and Tony set out on their journey.

Green Book Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for Green Book is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

based on your knowledge of context, discuss how characters and events have been represented in a particular way

Actually, I don't have a lot of personal context for the book but you can check out the themes page below:

https://www.gradesaver.com/green-book/study-guide/themes

Based on the clip, what was Victor Hugo Green’s job and what was his “first source of information” for writing The Green Book?

I'm sorry, I do not know what you are referring to when you say "clip". We do not have access to student curriculum.

From the screenplay:

Yeah. Cover had a bunch of kids sitting around a campfire?

Study Guide for Green Book

Green Book study guide contains a biography of Peter Farrelly, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

• About Green Book
• Green Book Summary
• Character List
• Director's Influence

Essays for Green Book

Green Book essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of Green Book by Peter Farrelly.

• Investigate symbolism within Green Book and explore the ways it enhances themes and emotions.

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Stereotypes and Discrimination in the "Green Book" Movie: A Critical Discourse Analysis

2021, International Journal of Systemic Functional Linguistics

This research entitled Stereotypes and Discrimination in the "Green Book" Movie: Critical Discourse Analysis aims to analyze the stereotypes and discrimination that occur in the main character, Don Shirley. The theory used in this research is critical discourse analysis theory by Van Dijk. In this research, researchers found many expressions or utterances and actions that refer to stereotypes and discriminatory behavior committed by white people against black people in America. This study uses qualitative methods because qualitative is a procedure that produces descriptive data in the form of written and spoken words. The results showed that this case contained three types of discrimination and stereotypes. First, Individual Discrimination is presented in the unfair treatment by white people against the main black figure, Don Shirley. Second, Institutional Discrimination occurs in the police institution where the police imprison Don Shirley who has not committed a crime at all, but only because he is black. Third, Structural Discrimination occurs in the form of policies carried out by majority races which have a negative impact on racial minorities.

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'The Green Book' is a movie about racism, made by white people for white people. See the problem?

About an hour into “Green Book,” I found myself struggling with Stockholm syndrome. Viggo Mortensen and Mahershala Ali are incredible actors — and they could make fine wine out of Pruno — so once they both began to loosen up and like each other, I started to like them, and to believe in their on-screen friendship. However, there are movies that appeal to one’s better angels, and then there’s ones that pander, and I got sucked in because of the latter — not because of some inherent maliciousness in the pandering, but because of my own thoughtlessness, laziness and socialization.

I don’t think anyone who made “Green Book” consciously set out on a mission to make white people feel smug and self-congratulatory about race relations, but that’s the end result of watching it. There are plenty of people who are not hateful, racist or willfully ignorant who will enjoy “Green Book”; I am very sure that I know and love a whole lot of people who will enjoy “Green Book." (I’d wager that the white people who go see “Green Book” think of themselves as socially open-minded people who like seeing other white folks overcome their prejudices and become friends. Which is, in fact, good!)

Opinion Are 'white people' jokes racist? Let a fellow white person explain.

But this movie was written, directed and produced by white people for white people, almost none of whom will have never found themselves at risk of a hate crime, much less a hate crime neatly solved by a tough white guy who, in one scene, eats an entire pizza folded up like a slice while relaxing in his undershirt and shorts.

In Peter Farrelly’s dramedy, based on the true story of Dr. Don Shirley’s friendship with Tony Lip, Ali stars as Shirley, the legendary composer and pianist who embarked on a two-month tour of the South with his musical trio in the 1960s. Lip, played by Mortensen, is a working-class guy from the Bronx who’s hired by Shirley to drive him from New York City and back by Christmas.

Lip isn’t sure why Shirley picked him from all the other candidates, and he’s not thrilled at the prospect of working for a black man — even an extraordinarily talented, educated and well-off black man — but he’s also not too racist to take the musician’s money.

Opinion White people are still raised to be racially illiterate. If we don't recognize the system, our inaction will uphold it.

It’s immediately obvious to the audience why Lip was hired: The former Frank Vallelonga (that’s right, the actor who played Carmine Lupertazzi on “The Sopranos”) is great at smooth-talking dangerous people — like the mobsters who run the Copacabana — but he’s even better at fighting (and eating).

And thus, every time Shirley finds himself in dangerous and violent situations, Lip steps in to save him — and not just from the racist townies or the racist policemen or the racist rich people, but from himself, because he refuses to bow to the racist conventions of the times. His refusal to accept those conventions, and not the racists upholding them, is what endangers Shirley over and over again (and strikes awe in the hearts of the white people around him), and is the reason Lip’s services are perceived as needed.

Here it’s worth noting that the script was co-written by Tony’s son Nick Vallelonga , who is also listed as a producer on the film, and I feel extremely bad for talking smack about what is obviously meant to be a tribute to his father and the power of interracial friendships as they were seen in the 60s. But movies that frame race in this way do a disservice to audiences, Vallelonga and Shirley.

The title refers to “The Negro Motorist Green Book,” a historical text I’m embarrassed to admit I’d never heard about before. It was written by a postal employee from Harlem named Victor H. Green, who wanted to provide a guide to safe havens for people of color during road trips, from bathrooms and gas stations to bathrooms, restaurants and hotels. As per the Washington Post, one ad in the book read, “If you’re traveling you don’t have to worry about accommodations — whether this place will take you in or that place will sell you food. That is if you’re white and gentile. If you’re not, you have to travel a careful route like seeking oases in a desert.”

The ugly reality of why the “Green Book” exists becomes all too clear to Lip the farther south they get, because he’s apparently only used to the slightly-less-overt racism he sees in New York. After all, he and the men in his family speak among themselves in Italian when they’re being racist.

Opinion Everyday racism in America: Being black means constantly rendering yourself unthreatening to white people

There’s almost a nugget of something interesting at the portrayal of the intersection of the Italian-American identity, the working class and education that could be vital, but it’s handled with about as much subtlety as you’d expect from the director of “There’s Something About Mary.” (It feels like a cheap shot to mention Farrelly’s other movies, but it’s not.) Unfortunately for Mortensen, his character isn’t really salvageable, and Lip as written leaves a Fonzie-like aftertaste in your mouth if, in between “AYYYY”s, Fonzie had also said things about how, as an Italian-American, many people saw him as socially/racially “worse” than a black man like Shirley. (Lip uses slightly different language that I won’t repeat here, but maybe I’m just more uptight than Mortensen .)

Shirley, for his part, keeps trying to teach Lip how to speak more eloquently, to stop stealing and to use his words instead of his fists, but the only thing Lip seems to learn is how to sweet-talk his wife (played by the woefully underused Linda Cardellini, who is one of the very few women in the movie to have more than a handful of lines) and to stop punching people without first trying to reason with them. Meanwhile, he teaches Shirley all about self-acceptance, the joys of eating fried chicken and Motown.

Once I shook off the glossy trappings of “Green Book” and its on-the-nose ending, I couldn’t still enjoy the friendship brought to life on the screen. It can sometimes be enough to just enjoy a movie and go on about your day, but if “Green Book” wants to be taken seriously as a film against racism — which it has positioned itself to be — it has to confront the lived reality of racism and the people it most directly affected (and still affects) in a deeply honest way. And when those people aren’t the ones who will leave “Green Book” feeling good, then it clearly hasn’t accomplished its objectives.

Jenni Miller is a freelance writer who covers movies, TV, sex, love, death, video games and assorted weirdness for a variety of publications online and in print.

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What Did Qaddafi’s Green Book Really Say?

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By Mohamad Bazzi

• May 27, 2011

If Libya’s ragtag coalition of rebels manages to dislodge Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi from power it will mean not only the fall of the longest reigning dictator in the Arab world but also the end of the ambitious ideological system that he dreamed would supersede all rivals. While much of the world sees him as an eccentric and brutal demagogue, Qaddafi has tried for decades to portray himself as a statesman-philosopher. It’s an aspiration best embodied in the Green Book, his notorious three-part meditation on politics, economics and everything from the evils of mechanized poultry farming to the importance of owning one’s car. In Libya, the text is omnipresent: several generations of students grew up studying it, and the government even constructed sculptures in its image.

Most analyses of the Green Book emphasize Qaddafi’s many digressions and penchant for stating the obvious, like his proclamation that “woman is a female and man is a male.” Because it is muddled, the book is often dismissed as simply a hodgepodge of aphorisms, the ramblings of a mad dictator. And in fact, the slim 21,000-word treatise does not present a coherent worldview. But the Green Book does have its own peculiar logic: a mixture of utopian socialism, Arab nationalism and the Third World revolutionary ideology that was in vogue at the time it was written, along with a streak of Bedouin supremacism. And its tone and style echo a long tradition in classical Arabic literature: that of the ruler or his faithful scribe expounding on matters of philosophy, politics, art, culture or whatever strikes his fancy.

In 1975, six years after he took power, Qaddafi published the first volume of the Green Book — immodestly titled “The Solution of the Problem of Democracy.” With it, he promised to rescue the world from the failures of Western democracy and Communism alike: his “Third Universal Theory” would usher in an era of mass democracy in which people would rule themselves directly. Qaddafi rails against elections, political parties and popular representation (“The most tyrannical dictatorships the world has known have existed under the shadow of parliaments”). He decries plebiscites as “a fraud against democracy.” The only genuine form of democracy, he argues, is one where the masses come together in people’s committees, popular congresses and professional associations. “The problem of democracy in the world,” he declares, “is completely solved.”

The second volume offers “The Solution of the Economic Problem,” a jumble of quasi-socialist ideals and capitalist notions. In some parts, Qaddafi appears to be a class-conscious self-help guru: “There are no wage-workers in the socialist society, only partners,” and “Man’s freedom is lacking if somebody else controls what he needs.” In other sections, he exalts property ownership: “There is no freedom for a man who lives in another’s house, whether he pays rent or not,” and “Your vehicle should not be owned by others.”

Some scholars have compared the Green Book’s political and economic ideology to Rousseau, Mao and Marx; others have traced its threads back to Islamic philosophy. But the book contains hardly any external references — no mentions of religious texts or political and economic thinkers that might have influenced Qaddafi. (One of the few hints of an external source is this gem of attributing the obvious: “According to a gynecologist, woman menstruates or suffers feebleness every month, while man, being a male, does not menstruate and he is not subject to the monthly period which is a bleeding.”)

By most accounts, Qaddafi was not particularly well educated or well read when he set about composing the Green Book. There is little doubt, however, that he was highly influenced by Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Egyptian officer who led a revolution in 1952 that ousted the ­British-backed King Farouk. As a teenager, Qaddafi listened to Cairo Radio’s “Voice of the Arabs” and memorized Nasser’s speeches. Nasser’s own slim treatise, “Egypt’s Liberation: The Philosophy of the Revolution,” was first published in 1955. Despite its title, there is little philosophy in this collection of anecdotes, ruminations, epiphanies and personal history. Even so, Nasser makes a forceful case for resisting imperialism by establishing Pan-Arab, Pan-African, and Pan-Islamic identities, and argues that it’s the duty of the leader to unite and lead these realms. Citing Luigi Pirandello’s “Six Characters in Search of an Author,” Nasser describes the Arab world as “wandering aimlessly in search of a hero” — no doubt Qaddafi saw himself as just such a hero.

Unlike the modernizing Nasser, however, Qaddafi also expressed a reverence for Bedouin and traditional tribal society. Here, Qaddafi was probably influenced by Ibn Khaldun, the 14th-century North African Muslim historian and philosopher whose “Muqaddimah,” or “Prolegomenon,” is considered a forerunner of modern social science. In his sweeping history of civilization, Ibn Khaldun divided society into two categories, nomadic and sedentary. He argued that as humans grow more “civilized” — and farther away from being strong, proud, free Bedouins — they become decadent and weak. Qaddafi champions Bedouin solidarity and contrasts the ills of modern life with an idealized “natural” past. For example, his attack on mechanized poultry farms (“The meat of wild birds is more tasty and nourishing because they grow naturally and are naturally fed”) is set within a larger diatribe against the evils of sending children to nurseries and the importance of “natural motherhood.” In another passage, Qaddafi calls compulsory education a “forced stultification of the masses” and urges a “worldwide cultural revolution to emancipate man’s mind from curricula of fanaticism.”

Soon after the publication of his first volume, Qaddafi announced that he would put the tenets of the Green Book into practice. He resigned from all official positions in 1977 and proclaimed himself the “Guide to the Era of the Masses.” Libyans, he claimed, would begin to rule themselves, replacing government administration with people’s committees — a network of town councils across Libya. Of course, Qaddafi and his cronies maintained an iron grip; the popular congresses were called into session a few times a year — at Qaddafi’s whim — and they simply reaffirmed the leader’s wishes.

In the 1980s, Qaddafi and his advisers tried to impose some of the economic ideas laid out in the Green Book, contorting themselves to put a veneer of local control on a centralized socialist system. They instituted a ­government-run supermarket system and issued an edict allowing each family to own only one home. Such “reforms” produced a system rife with corruption and mismanagement, and devastated the traditional merchant class.

But Qaddafi was not content with twisting Libyan society around the doctrine of the Green Book; he wanted to spread the gospel. The World Center for the Study and Research of the Green Book, a think tank in Tripoli, had a staff of more than 100 and branches around the world. (It was destroyed early this month by NATO airstrikes.) Throughout the 1980s and ’90s, the center had a ­multimillion-dollar annual budget, which was spent on translating the book into more than 30 languages, underwriting international conferences and churning out nearly 140 studies and scholarly papers on Qaddafi’s theories. Commentaries analyzing the text’s every aspect were taught in all Libyan schools, and masters and doctoral students at universities were encouraged to write dissertations on it. Small wonder, then, that when the current wave of Arab revolts reached Libya, one of the first expressions of the will of the masses was to burn the very book Qaddafi claimed would set them free.

Mohamad Bazzi teaches journalism at New York University and is an adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

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• What to Know About the Controversy Surrounding the Movie <i>Green Book</i>

What to Know About the Controversy Surrounding the Movie Green Book

D epending on who you ask, Green Book is either the pinnacle of movie magic or a whitewashing sham.

The film, which took home the prize for Best Picture at the 91st Academy Awards, as well as honors for Mahershala Ali as Best Supporting Actor and Nick Vallelonga, Brian Currie and Peter Farrelly for Best Original Screenplay, depicts the burgeoning friendship between a black classical pianist and his Italian-American driver as they travel the 1960s segregated South on a concert tour. But while Green Book was an awards frontrunner all season, its road to Oscar night was riddled with missteps and controversies over its authenticity and racial politics. Here’s a primer on the debate surrounding the film.

Green Book focuses on an odd couple: Donald Shirley and Tony “Lip” Vallelonga

Green Book is about the relationship between two real-life people: Donald Shirley and Tony “Lip” Vallelonga. Shirley was born in 1927 and grew up in a well-off black family in Florida, where he emerged as a classical piano prodigy: he possessed virtuosic technique and a firm grasp of both classical and pop repertoire. He went on to perform regularly at Carnegie Hall—right below his regal apartment—and work with many prestigious orchestras, like the Chicago Symphony and the New York Philharmonic. But at a time when prominent black classical musicians were few and far between due to racist power structures, he never secured a spot in the upper echelons of the classical world. (African Americans still only make up 1.8 percent of musicians playing in orchestras nationwide, according to a recent study .)

Vallelonga was born in 1930 to working-class Italian parents and grew up in the Bronx. As an adult he worked as a bouncer, a maître d’ and and a chauffeur, and he was hired in 1962 to drive Shirley on a concert tour through the Jim Crow South. The mismatched pair spent one and a half years together on the road—though it’s condensed to just a couple of months in the film— wriggling out of perilous situations and learning about each other’s worlds. Vallelonga would later become an actor and land a recurring role on The Sopranos .

In the 1980s, Vallelonga’s son, Nick, approached his father and Shirley about making a movie about their friendship. For reasons that are now contested, Shirley rebuffed these requests at the time. According to an interview with Nick Vallelonga in TIME , Shirley gave his blessing—but told him to wait until he died. Don Shirley’s nephew Edwin Shirley later told TIME in an email: “It was maybe thirty-five years ago when he approached Uncle Donald the first time. He refused to give his permission then. What happened after that, I don’t know.”

Tony Vallelonga and Shirley died within five months of each other in 2013. Nick Vallelonga then approached the screenwriter Brian Currie and director Peter Farrelly, who signed on to the project. In 2017, Oscar winner Mahershala Ali and Oscar nominee Viggo Mortensen agreed to play Shirley and Vallelonga, respectively.

Green Book becomes a surprise fan favorite

Green Book premiered at the Toronto Film Festival in September 2018 amid low expectations and received mixed reviews. Many familiar with Farrelly’s past films, comedies like There’s Something About Mary and Shallow Hal co-directed by his brother Bobby Farrelly, did not expect the director to take on a subject like Green Book ’s.

But the crowds there couldn’t get enough: the film won the festival’s People’s Choice Award. When the film opened in limited release in November, it earned the rare A+ CinemaScore , based on exit polls. That month, the National Board of Review named it the best film of 2018 .

The movie faces critical backlash and stumbles during its press tour

Despite its early success with audiences, many critics were less enthusiastic, pointing out how the film fit a little too neatly into a history of white savior films, from Blood Diamond to The Blind Side . The Root said it “spoon-feeds racism to white people.” The New York Times wrote that the film has “very little that can’t be described as crude, obvious and borderline offensive.” Indiewire labeled Shirley’s character a “Magical Negro,” whose sole purpose in the film was to change a white man for the better.

Brooke Obie, writing for Shadow and Act , also accused the film of erasing the very object it was named after: the Negro Motorist Green Book , a travel guide by Victor H. Green that was continuously updated from the 1930s through the ‘60s. The guide enabled African-American travelers to find hotels, restaurants and other safe spaces across the segregated Jim Crow South. It was well-known in the African-American community and reached a circulation of about 2 million by 1962.

But Obie pointed out that when Green’s book appears in the film, it is a prop mostly handled by Vallelonga: “Black people don’t even touch the Green Book, let alone talk about its vital importance to their lives,” she wrote. And while the guide leads the pair to run-down motels in the film, the real guide would have offered higher-end options to suit Shirley’s refined tastes.

The film’s press tour didn’t help. During a screening in November , Mortensen, who plays Vallelonga, said the N word in an attempt to show how norms have changed since the 1960s. He quickly apologized, and while Ali accepted his apology , many online did not.

Don Shirley’s family responds to Green Book

The floodgates opened even wider in December when Shadow and Act published an interview with the family of Donald Shirley. The family said that Nick Vallelonga and the creative team had completely left them out of the filmmaking process—and that the film was filled with falsehoods. Dr. Maurice Shirley, Donald’s brother, called it a “symphony of lies.”

The family took offense at the film’s depiction of Shirley’s being isolated from both the black community—citing his involvement in the Selma march—and his own family. “There wasn’t a month where I didn’t have a phone call conversation with Donald,” Maurice Shirley said in the interview.

But their most glaring accusation tore into the movie’s central tenet: that Donald Shirley and Tony Vallelonga were even friends. “It was an employer-employee relationship,” Maurice’s wife Patricia said.

The true nature of their relationship remains murky, but an interview outtake with Donald Shirley from the 2011 documentary Lost Bohemia appears to support the strength of their bond. “I trusted him implicitly,” Shirley said of Vallelonga. “Tony, not only was he my driver. We never had an employer-employee relationship. We got to be friendly with one another.”

The family’s criticisms prompted a defense from Nick Vallelonga—who said that Donald Shirley told him not to speak with anyone else about the film before he died—and Farrelly—who said that efforts were made to contact the family before filming. Ali, meanwhile, apologized, and said that he would have consulted family members if he had known that they were alive. “What he said was, ‘If I have offended you, I am so, so terribly sorry,’” Donald Shirley’s nephew Edwin said of Ali in Shadow and Act . “’I did the best I could with the material I had.’”

“They could have done better”

In an email to TIME, Edwin Shirley expanded on his disappointment over the film. “The character so superbly played by Mahershala Ali was simply not the Uncle Donald I knew,” he wrote.

Edwin Shirley recalled watching his uncle discuss his musical process with Alvin Ailey and Miles Davis before and after performances in the 1980s. He said that in both instances, his uncle stressed the importance of remaining faithful to a composer’s intent. “He was concerned with not harming the work of others in the process of creating something of his own,” he said.

He wrote that the creation of Green Book runs counter to this ethos: “They made a commercially successful, a popular movie, but in the process, distorted and diminished the life of one of the two main characters. They’ve impaired the integrity of Donald Shirley’s life with events and innuendoes that just run counter to the man I knew.”

He also referenced a line in the film in which Donald Shirley tells Tony that he can do better. “For me, that was the most authentic scene in Green Book , and it’s my response to why I’ve been critical of it. In spite of its box office success, the awards it’s won and may yet win— they could have done better . Given what, and who they had to work with, they could have made a richer, more nuanced character of him, and the film.”

“He gave us back Dr. Shirley”

Michael Kappeyne, a friend of Donald Shirley’s and the executor for his estate, views the portrayal differently. Kappeyne met Shirley in 1997 and soon began taking piano lessons with him in Shirley’s Carnegie apartment. What began as twice-a-month hourly lessons accelerated into weekly meetings that could stretch longer than four hours. Kappeyne also produced Shirley’s last album, Home with Donald Shirley , in 2001.

Kappeyne says that during their lessons, Shirley would tell him stories from his life, including of the trip portrayed in Green Book . “He would relay anecdotes about his driver, Tony, and would tell about the speeding ticket,” Kappeyne said in an interview with TIME, referencing a scene in the movie. “The white cop couldn’t stand that he had a white Italian driver and Donald was the boss. He told that one several times—that was one of his favorites.”

Kappeyne was consulted before filming began about Shirley’s history and posture at the piano. He said that when he saw the film at a friends and family screening, he and other friends of Shirley were “over the moon.” “Dr. Shirley was a very, very complex man. Mahershala really got that part: He got the inner anger, the sense of solitude, the complete dignity he always had and his interest in helping people,” Kappeyne said. “It was like he was back to life. For two hours, he gave us back Dr. Shirley.”

An old friend of Donald Shirley’s remembers

While Shirley and Vallelonga take up most of the film’s screen time, the other two members of the Donald Shirley Trio also appear throughout, in concerts and stops along the road. In the film, they are named Oleg and George. But at the time, Shirley’s real bandmates were the bassist Ken Fricker and the cellist Juri Taht. Both played with Shirley over the course of several decades . Fricker passed away in 2013, but in a phone interview with TIME, his ex-wife, Betty Aiken, recalled spending time with Shirley.

“Don was wonderful. He was always very friendly to me,” Aiken said. She recalled that during one concert, Shirley strayed from his regular repertoire to play “Happy Birthday” for her toddler son.

Like the Shirley family, Aiken refuted the idea that Donald Shirley lived in isolation. “The only problems that I remember were Don being annoyed when people made noise when he was playing. He did not like it when he wasn’t respected,” she said. Aiken also remembered hearing from her husband about the difficulties of the tour depicted in the film: “He said that [Shirley] was very upset with the bathroom arrangements and the bubblers, the drinking fountains. That really upset Don.”

As far as Shirley’s relationship with Vallelonga, Aiken said she had no knowledge one way or the other: “I don’t remember anything about that.”

Attempts to reach Taht were unsuccessful.

The movie faces a rough week after wins at the Golden Globes

Despite the many criticisms, the film glided into the Golden Globes with five nominations and left with three wins , including Best Motion Picture – Comedy or Musical. But what should have been a celebratory night turned awkward after the creative team was ridiculed on Twitter for its overwhelming whiteness.

The next few days resulted in a fresh slew of bad publicity. A tweet by Nick Vallelonga was unearthed in which he supported Donald Trump’s debunked claim that American Muslims had cheered on 9/11:

Vallelonga apologized and directed a personal apology to Ali, who is Muslim. “I am also sorry to my late father who changed so much from Dr. Shirley’s friendship and I promise this lesson is not lost on me,” he wrote. “ Green Book is a story about love, acceptance and overcoming barriers, and I will do better.”

The same day, the Cut unearthed a 1998 article in which Peter Farrelly admitted to displaying his penis on set as a joke. He apologized , saying: “I was an idiot.”

Green Book ‘s chances at the Oscars

But the firestorm did not slow the film’s awards campaign. Farrelly was nominated for outstanding directorial achievement from the Directors Guild of America; then the film was nominated for five Academy Awards, including Best Picture and acting nods for both Ali and Mortensen.

Meanwhile, the film has picked up steam at the box office, raking in its best week ever at the end of January with $7.9 million. The movie, which was made for $23 million, has now made over $61 million overall.

The film has also garnered prominent defenders, including Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who wrote an essay supporting the film in The Hollywood Reporter . “Unless they’re making a documentary, filmmakers are history’s interpreters, not its chroniclers,” he wrote. “ Green Book interprets the sea of historical events to reveal a truth relevant to today: Resist those who would tell you to know your place.”

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Book Reviews

Author john green explores how to live in uncertainty in 'the anthropocene reviewed'.

The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet, John Green Dutton hide caption

The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet, John Green

For most of human existence, things didn't change much within a single lifetime.

If you lived a thousand years ago, the tools you used were probably the same ones as your great grandparents. And other than big events like a volcano, the physical world didn't change much either.

Not anymore. Now we live in the Great Acceleration, also known as the Anthropocene, where even the Earth gets updates to its apps. Change (like global warming and pandemics) is the hallmark of this new era. How to live in the midst its uncertainty without falling into despair is the open question. In his new book, The Anthropocene Reviewed , John Green uses humor, wisdom and a keen sense of connections to offer us something like an answer.

Green is a long time book reviewer and author of the best-seller The Fault In Our Stars . Like many of us, Green looks at the changes we face with a mix of dread, bewilderment and the need to find hope. Early on in this book, he notes the contradiction of human power at the heart of living in the Anthropocene. "We are at once far too powerful and not powerful enough," he writes, being able "to radically reshape the Earth's climate and biodiversity but not powerful enough to choose how we reshape it."

But to live in this hyperconnected, hyper-accelerated world also means there can be no escape. As his wife tells him "in the Anthropocene, there are no disinterested observers, there are only participants." That's why Green makes the act of reviewing the central conceit of the book.

Green begins by pointing out a unique feature of our cultural moment. "In the years since I'd been a book reviewer," he writes, "everyone had become a reviewer and everything a subject of review." Driving with his brother through Badlands National Park, he checks its Google reviews to find "Not enough mountain." Later he discovers a review of a bench in Amsterdam, made famous via a scene in the movie version of The Fault In Our Stars . "It's a bench," says the reviewer. Green takes the absurdist quality of these judgments to heart by building a book made of more than 40 short essays, each acting as a "review" of some aspect of our lives in the Anthropocene.

Each essay is a web of salient and unexpected connections. The first, for example, focuses on the song "You'll Never Walk Alone," tracking its global, wandering history. From an origin in the musical Carousel to a chant for British soccer fans, to being sung by British paramedics praising fellow health care workers during the pandemic, Green sees something profoundly necessary in the sappy song. Recalling the line "At the end of the storm there's a golden sky and the sweet song of a lark," Green goes on to note: "But in reality, at the end of a storm there are tree branches everywhere, and downed power lines and flooded rivers." And yet, that pandemic image of paramedics using the song to cheer on their spent colleagues gives Green hope that storms and the courage to face them must go together.

He gives the song "You'll Never Walk Alone" 4.5 stars out 5.

In the essay "Human Temporal Range" Green uses the idea of species longevity (i.e., their temporal range) to muse on Anthropocene dread and the fear of our own extinction. He notes that species have always been coming and going. We humans haven't even been around very long. We're are younger than coyotes, blue whales and turtles, so would the Earth really miss us that much if we go? While this gives him some helpful perspective, Green does, of course, want us to go on . "What scares me about the end of humanity is the end of all those memories..." Greene laments, "if no one is around to play Billie Holiday records those songs won't make a sound anymore. We've caused a lot of suffering, but we've also caused much else."

So, by way of hope, Greene gives "human temporal range" 4 stars out 5.

And so it goes. Jurassic Park 's computer generated velociraptors get just 3 stars because while Green loves them, the real ones were much shorter and probably not very scary. CNN, and all of cable news, get just 2 stars for hindering our chances of dealing with the complex issues of the Anthropocene. The Internet gets 3 stars for being, well, the Internet. "Plague" unsurprisingly gets 1 star (though the essay is an easy 5). And Googling strangers, deservedly, gets 4.

What Green is really telling us with these unexpected stories about Sycamore Trees, Canada Geese and Dr. Pepper is how much there is to love in the world and why that love is worth the effort. As he writes, "To fall in love with the world isn't to ignore or overlook suffering both human and otherwise .... We all know how loving ends. But I want to fall in love anyway, to let it crack me open." The point, says Green — giving us Maurice Sendak's final words — is simple even in, and perhaps especially because of, these challenging times: "Live your life, live your life, live your life."

Adam Frank is an astrophysics professor at the University of Rochester and author of Light of the Stars: Alien Worlds and the Fate of the Earth . You can find more from Adam here: @adamfrank4 .