Green Book

The true story of an extraordinary road trip and a wonderful friendship between an ex-doorman (Viggo Mortensen) and an exceptional musician (Oscar-winner Mahershala Ali). Tony Lip, a bouncer with Italian roots, is hired as a driver in 1962. He is to accompany Dr. Don Shirley, an African-American and one of the world's best jazz pianists, on a concert tour from New York City to the conservative south of the USA, where racial segregation is still in force. To make their trip as pleasant as possible and to avoid possible racist attacks, the men follow the ‘Negro Motorist Green Book’, an annual travel guide for the black population. The “Green Book” contains tips on motels, restaurants and petrol stations where you should be served without any problems... in theory. Confronted with the racial hatred still blazing in the South, the two different men befriend each other - defying the boundaries of education, skin color and “class”... "As the tour begins, the three main narrative strands - true or not true - become more and more interwoven. And with each further narrative twist, they create the tragicomic friction that is the real attraction of GREEN BOOK and makes it one of the best films of recent months for me. [...] Above all, GREEN BOOK does not make the mistake that a film with a similar cast to ZIEMLICH BESTE FREUNDE makes, in which the old white strategies of self-empowerment are subcutaneously perpetuated in a superficial critique of racism. In GREEN BOOK, the black man is not the nature boy who can dance and who has leased emotionality for himself; no, here the black man is the intellectual, the stiff, the successful one who has been socialized with classical music. Instead, the white man listens to “black” music and is prepared to beat people up and lie. And even this disguised racist attitude - the white man returns to his high culture, the black man to his blues roots - which can be questioned at first glance, is immediately disempowered again through stubbornness of character and ironic fine-tuning. [...] GREEN BOOK is not only an outstanding, exciting, humorous, dark and hopeful film about survival in apartheid structures and their deconstruction, a film about friendship and its limits, about poverty and wealth, but also a clever statement about music, which tells the fourth story in the film like an independent dialog and poses the important question of the extent to which music can create identity at all - and in the end: save it." (Axel Timo Purr, on: artechock.de)