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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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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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Film Review: ‘Green Book’

Viggo Mortensen gains 30 pounds to play a racist chauffeur who comes around in this feel-good flip on the 'Driving Miss Daisy' formula.

By Peter Debruge

Peter Debruge

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OK, class, who can explain what a Green Book is? For those who don’t know, it was a handbook for black motorists seeking “vacation without aggravation,” an indispensable travel guide listing friendly places to stay and tips for avoiding trouble in the Jim Crow South. As such, “Green Book” makes a clever title for a road movie unlike any other: the true story of the unlikely friendship between a black concert pianist and the New York City bouncer hired to chauffeur him through unfriendly territory.

Although inspirational on its surface, the film presents a pretty bleak picture of intolerance in 1962 America, when segregation and other openly racist policies would have made such a trip a dangerous prospect for a wealthy, well-educated black man, with or without a bruiser like Frank Anthony Vallelonga to watch his back. Featuring a pair of terrific performances by Viggo Mortensen as a goombah with a heart of gold and Mahershala Ali as multilingual composer-musician Don Shirley, the story may be unique, yet it goes pretty much exactly the way you might expect, with one huge twist: The credits read “Directed by Peter Farrelly ” — which means this feel-good tour through American bigotry was made by one-half of the sibling duo responsible for “Dumb and Dumber” and “There’s Something About Mary.”

Turns out, that’s not such a bad thing, considering that the Farrelly brothers (whose gross-out sensibility ushered in the current era of R-rated comedies) showed that they were really a couple of sentimental softies somewhere around the time of “Shallow Hal.” Besides, if ever there was a project to challenge audiences’ assumptions about what certain people are capable of, this is it.

A play-it-safe crowd-pleaser in the family-friendly vein of “Hidden Figures” and “The Help” — movies that condemn racism as if the problem were already solved rather than still alive and well — “Green Book” may as well be “Driving Miss Daisy” in reverse, focusing on the inevitable fireworks when an elegant black man hires an ill-mannered guy from the Bronx to drive him around the South. It works on account of the chemistry between the two leads, both of whom are showing audiences a different side of themselves.

Enjoying his first starring role post-“Moonlight,” Ali may as well be playing the opposite of the empathetic drug dealer whose too-brief screen time in the first segment of Barry Jenkins’ film lifted the entire experience: Dr. Don Shirley is a regal black man whose cultured upbringing makes him an uptight Henry Higgins type to Mortensen’s Tony (who calls him “Doc” for short). Meanwhile, packing on 30 pounds to play a good old boy from the Bronx, Viggo gets a laugh every time he opens his mouth — always for one of two purposes: either to hustle whoever’s listening into giving him what he wants (hence his nickname, “Tony Lip”) or else to stuff food inside it (he seems to spend half the movie eating, whether it’s engaging in hot dog-eating contests at the local diner or alone in his hotel room, folding a pizza in half for a late-night snack).

We seldom get to see Mortensen in comic roles, but his goofy, sideways smile seems perfectly suited to this one, making it hard — even when he’s saying things that are nowhere near politically correct — to dislike the guy for long. Then again, it’s the responsibility of movies like this to remind audiences that attitudes were not always so enlightened when it comes to race relations in this country, and “Green Book” does a fine job of depicting the rampant disrespect that people of color were shown not only in the Deep South but also in New York City, where Shirley keeps an elaborately decorated apartment above Carnegie Hall (end-credits photos suggest the production designers actually downplayed his eclectic decorating style).

Costume designer Betsy Heimann outfits Ali in period-specific clothes that make it perfectly clear, from the moment he first appears on-screen, that Shirley is proud of his heritage and, for the remainder of the film, that he belongs to a much better class than Tony, who’s seen splattering a client’s blood across the front of his red Copacabana blazer in the opening scene. When the club closes for renovations, working-class Tony needs to find another gig fast, so long as it’s honest (if he’s not careful, the Sopranos-like local crime families will have him doing shady side jobs), which is how he finds himself interviewing for the role of Dr. Shirley’s driver on an eight-week concert tour — which will mean leaving wife Linda Cardellini home with the kids, while Shirley’s two fellow musicians, bassist Mike Hatton and Russian cellist Dimiter D. Marinov, take their own car.

One of the running themes in “Green Book” — and perhaps the quality two guys from such different cultural backgrounds saw and respected in each other — is these men each observe unwritten codes of honesty and honor, and though they don’t always align, they come from a place of personal integrity. Of course, it’s a nice reversal that, as this uncouth white guy’s boss, Shirley has the power to insist that Tony adhere to his values, which means forcing him to return a “lucky rock” stolen from a roadside stand. Later, as their dynamic starts to loosen, they trade requests: Tony talks Shirley into trying some genuine Kentucky Fried Chicken, but Shirley gets the last laugh, insisting that Tony go back after tossing his empty soda cup out the window.

The movie would be plenty amusing if it were focused entirely on these two characters getting to know each another, opening one another’s eyes in the process. But given their route, it’s the audience’s eyes that are opened as “Green Book” shows just how inhuman Americans could be to their neighbors in 1962: At first, it’s just the indignity of not being allowed to eat, sleep, or relieve oneself in the same establishments, until one night in Kansas, when Shirley ventures into a bar alone and receives a beating for the simple fact of being black. Tony shows up just in time to rescue Shirley from the rednecks’ clutches, but it’s a clue to the abuse that lies ahead — not only from belligerent hicks but also from the police (they’re pulled over more than once) and, most insultingly, from the high-society whites who’ve engaged Shirley’s services.

Oh, but to hear Shirley play! Mortensen’s role may be the showier of the two, but Ali is a marvel to watch in his musical performances. The actor suggests Eddie Murphy in “Coming to America” crossed with the composure Adrien Brody brought to “The Pianist,” where performing serves as a way to communicate across cultural differences, and also to redirect the frustration of all the ways he has been mistreated. Constantly rewarding us with music, the soundtrack mixes the trio’s concert pieces with “black music” that Shirley doesn’t recognize — like Little Richard and Chubby Checker — culminating in an impromptu Christmas concert and the group-hug ending audiences want. “Green Book” can’t heal racism, but it’s a reminder that spending time with people different from ourselves, even if only in the dark on a movie screen, can be the key to combating prejudice.

Related: “Green Book” Is a Story Perfect for Today

Reviewed at Toronto Film Festival (Gala Presentations), Sept. 11, 2018. MPAA Rating: PG-13. Running time: 130 MIN.

• Production: A Universal Pictures release of a Participant Media, DreamWorks Pictures presentation of a Charles B. Wessler, Innisfree Pictures production, in association with Cinetic Media. Producers: Jim Burke, Charles B. Wessler, Brian Currie, Peter Farrelly, Nick Vallelonga. Executive producers: Jeff Skoll, Jonathan King, Octavia Spencer, Kwame L. Parker, John Sloss, Steven Farneth. Co-producer: James B. Rogers.
• Crew: Director: Peter Farrelly. Screenplay: Nick Vallelonga, Brian Currie, Peter Farrelly. Camera (color, widescreen): Sean Porter. Editor: Patrick J. Don Vito. Music: Kris Bowers.
• With: Viggo Mortensen, Mahershala Ali , Linda Cardellini, Sebastian Maniscalco, Dimiter D. Marinov, P.J. Byrne.

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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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Green Book review: Viggo Mortensen and Mahershala Ali give this civil rights fairy tale a lift

Both actors give such nuanced performances that audiences will swallow the sentimental moralising of peter farrelly's oscar-nominated film , article bookmarked.

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Dir: Peter Farrelly; Starring: Viggo Mortensen, Mahershala Ali, Linda Cardellini, Dimeter Marinov, Mike Hatton, Iqbal Theba. Cert 12A, 130 mins

If there were Oscars for eating hot dogs, Viggo Mortensen would win this year’s award hands down (and mouth stuffed). Mortensen gives a wonderful, method-style performance as Frank “Tony Lip” Vallelonga, a wiseguy nightclub bouncer from the Bronx who becomes the driver for black virtuoso pianist Don Shriley ( Mahershala Ali ) on a tour of the deep south in the early Sixties.

Green Book flatters the audience about its own good sense and tolerance. It deals with racism and homophobia but still has a fairytale, fantasy feel to it. Whatever humiliations Don endures on their road trip, we know no real harm will ever come to him as long as Tony is at his side. This is a film about friendship as much as it is about civil rights. We can also safely predict that the pair’s better qualities will rub off on each other: Tony will overcome his prejudices while Don will learn not to be quite such a cultural snob.

Mortensen plays Tony as a hedonistic, impulsive brawler. He is a likeable everyman in spite of his prejudices, but he is also an opportunist who will do anything for a buck. His temperament could not be more different to that of his new boss, the refined and aloof classically-trained musician. Don – nicknamed “the doctor” – is very fussy, very particular. “He plays like Liberace but better,” it is said of him at one stage.

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Mortensen is the Sancho Panza figure to the very refined Don Quixote type played beautifully by Ali. And they make quite a double act, providing an emotional charge to a film that might otherwise have seemed trite and manipulative.

The film is crude and delicate by turns. Farrelly is known for the often very broad comedies like There’s Something About Mary and Dumb and Dumber he directs with his brother, Bobby. Some of the gags and visual observations here could come from such works. For example, early on, in order to show the audience that Tony is an unreconstructed racist, there is a long drawn-out scene in which he picks up water glasses that black repairmen have drunk out of as if they are contaminated and drops them in the garbage.

Tony and Ali head off from New York on an epic road trip with the rest of Ali’s band following in the car behind. In the course of the journey, Tony marvels at “nature” and pines for his wife. Don dictates the fulsome, heartfelt letters he writes to her. The pianist also gives his driver tips on diction, etiquette and provides Sunday school-style lectures on why stealing is wrong.

The film’s title comes from a handbook for African-American drivers, telling them just what to do to stay out of trouble in the Jim Crow south. Don gives Tony a copy – and so the white, Italian-American gets a taste of the black motorist’s experience.

• Viggo Mortensen defends controversial Oscar frontrunner Green Book

The film is full of reversals and ironies like this. Again and again during the journey, each man’s preconceptions are challenged. The further south they head, the more prejudice they encounter. Don’s musical virtuosity is generally applauded by the white spectators but that doesn’t mean he is allowed to use the same bathrooms or stay in the same motels.

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Don is an elegant, cerebral figure, steeped in classical music but unaware of the Aretha Franklin and James Brown, music that his driver cherishes. He drinks a specific brand of whisky, and won’t play on anything other than a Steinway. While he sits in the back, Tony is at the wheel, grease from his fried food running down his chin, chattering away. “You people love fried chicken,” he tells his boss in one of the casually racist remarks he makes throughout the first part of the film – but he is the one who eats such food. Indeed, there is barely a scene in the film in which he isn’t devouring chicken wings or sausages or whatever other convenience food is available.

There are some strange digressions and inconsistencies in characterisation, however. For all his meticulousness, Don acts in very erratic fashion. He gets drunk, and his sexual escapades land him in jail. He may be perceptive enough about relationships to know just what Tony should write to his wife but he is a loner who doesn’t have a partner of his own. There is a masochistic fatalism to him that the film touches on but doesn’t want to explore too deeply.

Don embarks on the tour out of defiance: he wants to confront southern racism head on. He shows courage and heroic restraint in the way he deals with his white hosts. But at the same time, he is painfully naïve, and when it comes to street smarts, Tony is the virtuoso. He knows how to face down thugs in a bar.

Green Book is based on a true story but has clearly taken considerable liberties with its source material. It eventually turns into a full-blown Christmas movie, with all the usual trimmings. The doc’s one-man campaign for racial equality is forgotten as the two men make their epic journey back north, and the film begins to turn as mushy as the winter weather they encounter en route. The underlying message here is similar to that in Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life in which we learn “no man is a failure who has friends”. There is room at the Christmas table for everyone.

The sugarcoating is very thick. It doesn’t matter, though. Ali and Mortensen make a tremendously engaging odd couple. Both give such nuanced and well-observed performances that most audiences will swallow the sentimental moralising as easily as Tony digests his hot dogs.

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Top gun 3’s character return fixes top gun: maverick’s tragic twist, henry cavill's new $19 million bomb saves him from making a grim sequel, green book is a delightful and inspiring story fueled by terrific performances by its leads, a sharp screenplay, and deft direction..

Premiering at the 2018 Toronto International Film Festival (where it took home the coveted 2018 People's Choice Award),  Green Book emerged as one of this year's leading and surprising Oscar contenders. The film is the latest work by director Peter Farrelly, best known as one half of the Farrelly brothers duo behind comedy hits like  Dumb and Dumber and  There's Something About Mary . Here, he makes the leap to different territory, chronicling a real-life friendship that blossomed during a tumultuous time for America. There might have been some fear that Farrelly would be out of his element, but that couldn't be further from the case.  Green Book is a delightful and inspiring story fueled by terrific performances by its leads, a sharp screenplay, and deft direction.

Green Book is set in 1962, picking up as working class Italian-American Tony "Lip" Vallelonga (Viggo Mortensen) finds himself needing new work after the Copacabana closes for two months due to renovations. As he looks around for a job to support his wife Dolores (Linda Cardellini) and two kids, Tony interviews for a driving position with Dr. Don Shirley (Mahershala Ali). Shirley, an African-American classical pianist, is set to tour the deep South and needs an associate to not only transport him to concert venues, but also act as security if any issues arise.

Even though the job will keep Tony away from his family for eight long weeks, the nice payday encourages him to take it. Promising Dolores he'll be home for Christmas, Tony hits the road with Dr. Shirley and the other two members of Shirley's musical trio, using the  Negro Motorist Green Book as a guide to find colored-friendly establishments at the various tour stops. Vallelonga and Shirley will have to work hard to overcome their personal differences and the injustices they'll face along the way. But it could be a very rewarding experience for both men, changing their lives for the better in more ways than one.

After its run at the festival circuit,  Green Book drew several comparisons to Best Picture winner  Driving Miss Daisy , leading some viewers to find it a bit safe and conventional in its storytelling and themes. There's no denying audiences should be able to plot out the narrative's trajectory in their heads, but that doesn't diminish the journey in the slightest. Tony Lip's son Nick Vallelonga is one of three credited co-writers (along with Farrelly and Brian Hayes Currie), which helps the film find its crucial sense of authenticity. While Nick didn't accompany his father and Shirley on the tour, the script no doubt takes inspiration from Tony's stories about his time in the South. The writing team deserves credit for blending comedy and drama, as  Green Book is never short on levity, yet still shines a spotlight on the rather serious and frustrating racial prejudices that were so prevalent in the segregation era. A number of clever callbacks and payoffs peppered throughout the script also ensure no scene goes to waste, as the film cruises through its runtime.

Farrelly specializes in gross-out humor that doesn't work for everyone, but he shows a refreshing constraint here, handling potentially sensitive subject matter with the grace and care it deserves. He tones down his usual sensibilities, with all of the comedy feeling natural and in-character. Collaborating with production designer Tim Galvin and cinematographer Sean Porter, the director also takes moviegoers straight back to the 1960s, drawing viewers in with its tone and aesthetic from the opening minutes. Farrelly definitely borrows from the Martin Scorsese playbook in places (the presence of the Copacabana will bring  Goodfellas to mind), employing a catchy soundtrack full of old school pop tunes to complement Shirley's virtuoso piano performances. But his approach doesn't come across as derivative, instead adding to the already captivating atmosphere.

For all the strong work by Farrelly and his crew, it's hard to imagine  Green Book working as well as it does without the presence of Mortensen and Ali. The two actors are a perfectly matched pair, playing off each other with great chemistry. Mortensen arguably has the showier role of the two, completely transforming into the larger-than-life figure of Tony Lip. After putting together a string of more serious-minded turns, it's nice to see the actor loosen up and have some fun as the street-wise bouncer. In a lesser thespian's hands, Tony Lip may have become a caricature, but Mortensen maintains Vallelonga's humanity throughout. Ali gives a reserved and soulful performance as Shirley, tapping into the character's inner turmoil of being a person torn between two worlds. He gives off a fittingly regal and sophisticated aura, but also has convincing dramatic outbursts to make it a well-rounded portrayal. Both leads have rightfully been in discussion for Oscar nominations and definitely deserve them.

With so much of the focus on Tony Lip and Dr. Shirley's dynamic, the supporting cast unfortunately gets lost in the background. Farrelly populates New York with other members of the Vallelonga family, and while they deliver a solid laugh or two during brief interludes in the second act, they aren't given much to work with. Even Cardellini (who makes the most of her short screen time) amounts to little more than the housewife missing her loving husband. To be fair, this is most likely a byproduct of the story's nature, rather than negligence on the part of the creative team. The crux of  Green Book's plot doesn't lend itself to being an ensemble piece, but it should be noted none of the actors are bad in their roles. They all do what's necessary, filling out the world Farrelly created. The lone exception is Dimiter D. Marinov as Oleg, a member of Shirley's trio, who has a few interactions with Tony Lip that hammer home some vital life lessons.

Green Book may not be as artistically daring or ambitious as some of 2018's other awards contenders, but it definitely lives up to the buzz and should be in the running for several major Oscars. The movie works on all fronts across the board, and its heartwarming story makes it the perfect film to catch over the Thanksgiving holiday. It could even be seen as the ideal antidote to today's divisive and trying times, depicting a touching tale of two people from wildly different backgrounds coming together and forging a lifelong bond. For cinephiles looking to keep up on the year's best as awards season heats up,  Green Book is worth seeing in theaters.

Green Book is now playing in U.S. theaters. It runs 130 minutes and is rated PG-13 for thematic content, language including racial epithets, smoking, some violence, and suggestive material.

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‘green book’: film review | tiff 2018.

Mahershala Ali and Viggo Mortensen star in Peter Farrelly's 'Green Book,' about an Italian-American bouncer chauffeuring an African-American pianist across the South in the 1960s.

By Todd McCarthy

Todd McCarthy

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Green Book is almost a contradiction in terms, a feel-good buddy comedy-drama featuring an elegant black musician and his white driver on tour in the pre-integration South of 1962. Arriving in the wake of any number of edgy cinematic takes on racial issues, this Universal release represents a very middle-of-the-road liberal approach to a story that pretty much could have been told anytime since the 1960s. Distinctive and amusing turns by Viggo Mortensen and Mahershala Ali make Peter Farrelly’s first solo feature outing a lively and likable diversion.

Since collaborating on his last feature in tandem with his brother Bobby, Dumb and Dumber To, in 2014, Farrelly directed a TV movie, Cuckoo, in 2015 and was behind the camera on all 10 episodes of the 2017 television series Loudermilk.

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Release date: Nov 21, 2018

The script by Nick Vallelonga, Brian Currie and the director was inspired by an actual tour made by the gifted, multi-faceted musician Don Shirley (Ali). As the film shows, the Jamaican-born Shirley could superbly play any kind of music, from classical to jazz; spoke numerous languages (including Russian); and carried himself as an aristocrat who placed great stock in propriety and decorum.

However, for a swing that would start in the North but make most of its stops south of the Mason-Dixon line, Shirley realizes he needs a white driver to run interference if necessary. He finds him in Tony “Lip” Vallelonga (Mortensen), an Italian-American bouncer and enforcer who could have fathered almost any of the characters on The Sopranos.

A dees-n-dohs kinda guy first seen working at the Copacabana and never averse to a little rough stuff, Tony has a short fuse, a healthy-unhealthy appetite (he wins $50 by eating 26 hot dogs in a contest), a nice wife (Linda Cardellini) and a couple of young boys. For this latest physically transformative part, Mortensen has packed on quite a few pounds, adopted a new gait and a perfect Italian-American accent and beautifully sunk himself into the role of a capable, don’t-mess-with-me wise guy. He really zings this performance.

The role of Shirley requires a similar broad jump for Ali, but in a very different direction. In an apartment above Carnegie Hall, Shirley lives in highly decorated splendor and aristocratically interviews Tony from a throne while wearing a white robe and gold jewelry. This hardly looks like a match made in heaven (Tony certainly doesn’t think so), but Shirley insists that this self-assured, good-natured tough guy is exactly who he needs to keep him safe down South.

The title refers to Victor Hugo Green’s The Negro Motorist Green Book, published annually from 1936-1966 as a guide for black travelers as to where they could stay, eat and receive services during the perilous days of Jim Crow and sundown laws.

As they head out of New York in a luxurious turquoise Cadillac (the two other members of the pianist’s trio drive separately), Shirley maintains a stoical hauteur as he aristocratically occupies in the back seat and, ironically, makes it clear that Tony needs to know his place. Farrelly has fun with their highly contrasting banter and in breaking down the barriers between the two, and by the time they hit Pittsburgh, Tony enthuses that his boss “plays like Liberace but better.” In general, what Shirley’s trio plays here could be described as very accomplished polite jazz.

Farrelly typically low-balls some of the humor, such as when Tony stops at a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet in — where better? — Kentucky and forces his haughty boss to try it (he likes it, he actually likes it). But it’s in that same state that “For Colored Only” signs start appearing and the tension starts seeping into every moment of the tour. “From now on, you don’t go nowhere without me,” Tony insists to his boss.

Moments after being applauded and congratulated for his lovely performances before all-white audiences, the impeccably accoutered and mannered Shirley is forced to stay in mostly forlorn motels and flop houses. There’s a short scene at a YMCA in which Tony bribes a cop to let Shirley go after what looks to have been a gay pickup, but no further mention is made of this side of the musician’s life.

The ironies and injustices mount with depressing regularity the longer the tour continues in the South, notably an encounter with racist police in Mississippi in which Shirley’s skin is saved due only to an appeal to a very high level indeed. There’s also a letting-off-steam interlude when the pair goes to a black honky-tonk and Shirley gets down musically for the first time.

The dynamic of these objectively mismatched men is almost like that of The Odd Couple, as the formal, uptight man is gradually loosened up by the more uncouth, working-class stiff, as understanding and mutual benefit ensues. As such, it’s a familiar and conservative creative dynamic that seems pretty old-fashioned at this moment in time, but the human interchange, enlivened as it is by two fine actors in responsive form, make it go down easily and enjoyably.

An initial musical sequence features a long uninterrupted look at Shirley playing some Chopin at the piano, and Ali’s fingering and exactitude in this performance is extremely impressive. Many will be curious as to whether this is real or not.

Production companies: Participant Media, DreamWorks Pictures Distributor: Universal Cast: Viggo Mortensen, Mahershala Ali, Linda Cardellini, Sebastian Maniscalco, Dimiter D. Marinov, P.J. Byrne, Montel Miller Director: Peter Farrelly Screenwriters: Nick Vallelonga, Brian Currie, Peter Farrelly Producers: Jim Burke, Charles B. Wessler, Brian Currie, Peter Farrelly, Nick Vallelonga Executive producers: Jeff Skoll, Jonathan King, Octavia Spencer, Kwame L. Parker, John Sloss, Steven Farneth Director of photography: Sean Porter Production designer: Tim Galvin Costume designer: Betsy Heiman Editor: Patrick J. Don Vito Music: Kris Bowers Casting: Rick Montgomery Venue: Toronto International Film Festival (Gala)

Rated PG-13, 130 minutes

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‘Green Book’ Review: Odd-Couple Dramedy Is Timely Feel-Good Movie

By Peter Travers

Peter Travers

Dr. Don Shirley ( Mahershala Ali ), an African-American classical-trained pianist on a jazz-trio tour in a part of 1960’s America that’s not prepared to embrace integration. In his search for a chauffeur, Don makes the curious choice of Frank Anthony Vallelonga, a.k.a. Tony Lip ( Viggo Mortensen ), a loudmouth Italian cliché temporarily off the Mob payroll as a bouncer back in New Yawk. They sure as hell don’t get off to an amicable start, with Don sitting like a king in a chic apartment above Carnegie Hall. Tony tells his client that he’s open-minded, claiming that “my wife and I had a couple coloreds over for drinks.” (In an earlier scene, two black men working in Tony’s home drink from glasses that he later trashes.)

What follows is a reverse twist on Driving Miss Daisy, as the duo set off on an eight-week concert tour filled with dangerous obstacles. Driver and passenger have two things on their side: Tony’s muscle and The Negro Motorist Green-Book, a travel guide published from 1936 to 1966 to assist black travelers about where to stay and what to avoid in the Jim Crow South. Welcome to Green Book, the winner of the Toronto Film Festival’s People’s Choice Award this year that’s “inspired” (that word!) by their real-life friendship.

Famed for the gross-out comedies he made with his brother Bobby — dump all you want on Dumb & Dumber, but Kingpin is immortal — Peter Farrelly’s impressive solo directorial debut the movie’s shifting tones; co-written by Farrelly, Brian Hayes Currie and Tony’s son, Nick Vallelonga, the script is filled with a piercing gravity that deepens the funny business. There are easy laughs when Tony teaches Don about the wonders of fried chicken while the musician helps his driver write letters home to his wife, Dolores (Linda Cardellini). And there are also bruising glimpses into a time when 
racial profiling had the law on its side. Green Book is a movie about class as well as race, and Farrelly rightly refuses to paint a pretty picture.

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Ali, a Best Supporting Actor Oscar winner for Moonlight, is superb at finding the buried rage in a refined artist challenging fellow Americans who never accepted the abolition of slavery. He makes us see that Don is on his own when it comes to finding a place to belong. And the actor, who had help from a pianist double in the club scenes, is simply stupendous at showing Don alive in his art. Tony senses his genius, but is horrified that Don doesn’t know Chubby Checker or Little Richard. “I’m blacker than you are,” the working-class driver snaps.

Mortensen is terrific, having beefed up by 30 pounds to play this bruiser with a Bronx honk and the dazed realization that his fists can’t change a damn thing. Sure, Tony roughs up white hypocrites who applaud the musician onstage and then bar him from their restaurants. But don’t mistake him for another white savior. The role is a game-changer for an actor, whose dramatic chops are a given (see his Academy nods for Eastern Promises and Captain Fantastic ) but proves he’s got a real flair for comedy that feels revelatory. He and Ali could take their own double act on the road.

Green Book ends in a gush of Christmas-themed feel-good that will probably drive some folks nuts. But look closer and you’ll see that 
Farrelly never forgets the shadows lurking outside the fierce but fragile connection that Don and Tony have forged over two mercurial months on the road. Simplistic? Maybe. But in a time when our nation is more divided than ever, the movie offers the possibility of redemption. Thanks to the dream team of Mortensen and Ali, audiences will be cheering. And they’ll be right.

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Movie Interviews

'green book' is about race — and also friendship, class and masculinity.

Sydney Harper

Mahershala Ali as musician Donald Shirley in Green Book , directed by Peter Farrelly. Universal Pictures, Participant, and DreamWorks hide caption

Mahershala Ali as musician Donald Shirley in Green Book , directed by Peter Farrelly.

Don "Doc" Shirley could have been one of the most famous classical musicians in the world had it not been for the color of his skin.

As a black man playing piano in the 1960s, Shirley was excluded from many of the great American music venues of the day. The indignities continued when he decided to tour the Deep South in 1962. Not only did he have to play what he felt were less desirable stages and styles, but the trip also required a white driver to get him safely from club to club.

The movie Green Book tells the story of Shirley and of his friendship with Tony Vallelonga, the white man he hired as his driver during that 1962 tour. In an interview with NPR, Mahershala Ali, who plays Shirley, describes why the musician felt compelled to go south.

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"It would have been too easy for him to stay up north or go to Europe and tour and travel and make money," Ali tells Morning Edition co-host Rachel Martin. "I think he was seeking to penetrate the stereotypes, especially once you cross that Mason-Dixon line. Doc Shirley wanted to expose himself to that environment for the good of changing minds and hearts."

On the tour, Shirley and Vallelonga used The Negro Motorist Green Book, a directory of businesses across the country that welcomed black travelers at a time when many places didn't.

A classical pianist and composer, Shirley grew up with dreams of playing on the world's most prestigious concert stages. He began collecting musical achievements early, learning piano at the age of 2 and performing his professional debut with Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 1 in B-flat minor at the Boston Pops at 18.

But Shirley's dreams of playing classical piano were deferred when a mentor advised that as a black man, he wouldn't be welcomed on concert stages around the world. He diverted from his classical aspirations to playing jazz, performing genre-bending compositions that also blended Negro spirituals and hints of classical music.

Interview Highlights

On why Shirley hired Vallelonga, who was openly racist, to drive him

I don't know if he would have even thought he could find someone else that would be that different. If you think about a white man agreeing to work for a black man in 1962 and drive him around in the South, it would have been challenging to find someone who could check all the boxes. I think that he approached it — and I'm guessing a bit — but I believe he would have approached it from the standpoint of believing that he would be able to be in control of the space in the car because he is the boss. He tolerates it because for him to complete this tour he needs his presence, but Tony needs Doc as well.

On the film's themes of masculinity and identity

It is a lot about masculinity and identity – and also giving people space to define that for themselves. As we're born, we're constantly having this negotiation between who we feel we are or what we feel we are with what the world is saying and guiding us to be, so that we all fit nicely into our categories. It's so much more complicated than that. I haven't seen Don Shirley's archetype before, and that was something that was really attractive to me because he was multidimensional.

If you look at Nina Simone — as much as we love and appreciate Nina Simone and her contributions to music and art — Nina Simone was never the Nina Simone that she wanted to be. She wanted to be a classical pianist. Don Shirley wanted to be a classical pianist. That's the experience of the black artist in this country — constantly being pointed and steered towards what's commercially profitable or where socially you're acceptable but not necessarily toward your talent and your freedom, and therefore eventually the fulfilling of your own potential.

On Ali's own perspective of fulfilling his potential as a black artist

Looking from my father to my grandfather, grandmother, my family — you inherit a little bit of the struggle. It means that even post-Oscar I have to advocate for myself. ... It doesn't mean that "Here is this trophy and then here's a leading role.' The conditions still are what they are, but you might have to say, "Hey, that second lead that you've handed me this script for? That's a cool part but I've done so much of that in my life. This leading part? I really want to play that part. That's the part I want to play."

I'm proud, and I feel fortunate to be in that place where I am in a position to speak up on certain things and perhaps change things, not only for myself but for a whole community of people at times. And any and all of us in those type of positions, when we have that kind of platform, have to be very conscious of having that responsibility and do our best to do good and be responsible with it.

Note: The broadcast version of this story aired Nov. 23. The digital story published Nov. 27.

• nina simone

Green Book Review

08 Feb 2019

The story of Tony Lip and Don Shirley is not a wildly original one. It’s an odd-couple road trip about how we’re all not so different, after all. No wheels are being reinvented here: it’s Driving Miss Daisy by way of Planes, Trains And Automobiles , if you like. But the execution is so outrageously appealing and good-hearted that surrendering to its charms feels like the only option. Peter Farrelly , most commonly known for leaning on the cheapest, dirtiest jokes he can find with his brother Bobby, here summons a gentler, more character-driven kind of humour, while telling a serious story about the compromises that African-Americans have been long forced to make by an oppressive white status quo.

What makes the film so compelling is the chemistry that crackles from the central pair of actors. As Tony Lip, Viggo Mortensen ’s enjoyably larger-than-life performance sometimes skirts the fringes of caricature, but you can’t fault the all-encompassing commitment or his performance. As with Don Shirley, we’re soon worn down by his gregariousness, and taken by his transformation; any memory of the softly spoken Dane who once wielded the reforged sword from the shards of Narsil is soon quashed at the sight of his unbelievable (and apparently real) Italianate gut.

The central humanistic message is important, necessary and correct.

Mahershala Ali ’s Don Shirley is a contrast, in every sense. A model of quiet elegance and self-possession, there’s humour to be found in his obsessive-compulsiveness and almost regal particularisms. But Ali, who has always been an incredibly thoughtful actor, coats his performance with a dignity and melancholy. His is not the average black experience in America, but as we later learn, he deliberately chooses to tour more hostile areas of the country, using his position as a celebrated musician for the sake of progress.

There’s been a fair few criticisms of Green Book ’s somewhat rose-tinted take on the appallingly violent reality of the Jim Crow South. You could certainly argue that its handle on racial politics is simplistic. But the film doesn’t shy from depicting racism in its ugliness and sadism when it counts. That it also acknowledges the intersectionality of Don’s experiences as a gay black man should not be ignored.

There are legitimate concerns that Green Book settles for lazy tropes about white saviours, but the central humanistic message is important, necessary and correct, and the fact that what could be a stiff, awards-hungry ‘message movie’ is in fact a crowdpleasing slice of mainstream entertainment means that message can reach audiences in all corners. At a time when racists are feeling more emboldened than they have any right to, that’s a very welcome message indeed.

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• Cast & crew
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A working-class Italian-American bouncer becomes the driver for an African-American classical pianist on a tour of venues through the 1960s American South. A working-class Italian-American bouncer becomes the driver for an African-American classical pianist on a tour of venues through the 1960s American South. A working-class Italian-American bouncer becomes the driver for an African-American classical pianist on a tour of venues through the 1960s American South.

• Peter Farrelly
• Nick Vallelonga
• Brian Hayes Currie
• Viggo Mortensen
• Mahershala Ali
• Linda Cardellini
• 1.8K User reviews
• 432 Critic reviews
• 69 Metascore
• 58 wins & 123 nominations total

• Dr. Donald Shirley

• Johnny Venere

• Record Exec

• Gio Loscudo

• Copa Coat Check Girl
• (as Maggie Nixon)

• Bobby Rydell

• Rydell Band Leader

• Jules Podell

• Copa Bouncer Danny

• Copa Maître D' Carmine

• Mikey Cerrone

• Johnny Randazzo

• Frankie Vallelonga
• (as Gavin Foley)
• All cast & crew
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• Trivia Upon the film's release, the Shirley family stated that Tony and Doc were not friends, they had "an employer-employee relationship". In January 2019, audio recordings of an interview with Don Shirley emerged in which he stated, "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."
• Goofs The version of "Lucille" that plays in the car is not the original 1957 recording, but a rerecording Little Richard made for K-Tel in 1976... 14 years after the film is set.

Tony Lip : The world's full of lonely people afraid to make the first move.

• Crazy credits The real-life photos (and a few insights into their lives after the events in the movie) of Dr. Donald Shirley and Frank "Tony Lip" Vallelonga are shown before the end credits roll.
• Connections Featured in CTV News at Six Toronto: Episode dated 11 September 2018 (2018)
• Soundtracks That Old Black Magic Written by Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer

User reviews 1.8K

• Top_Dawg_Critic
• Jan 2, 2019
• How long is Green Book? Powered by Alexa
• Does Mahershala Ali play the piano? What about when we see all of Mahershala's body, including his hands? He is absolutely mimicking the music we are hearing!
• November 16, 2018 (United States)
• United States
• Official Facebook
• Official Facebook (United Kingdom)
• Cẩm Nang Xanh
• Houmas House Plantation, Burnside, Louisiana, USA (Raleigh concert venue)
• Participant
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• Innisfree Pictures
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• $23,000,000 (estimated)
• $85,080,171
• Nov 18, 2018
• $321,752,656

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• Runtime 2 hours 10 minutes
• Dolby Surround 7.1

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Green Book Reviews

The score and editing are not memorable at all, with some scenes just feeling out of place, and a soundtrack that feels too on the nose at times.

Full Review | Original Score: C- | Apr 4, 2024

Green Book tells the story of the friendship between the renowned pianist and composer Don Shirley, and his driver and bodyguard Tony “Lip” Vallelonga in the sixties. The different cultures and social classes will be the main focus of the action.

Full Review | Original Score: 8/10 | Jan 27, 2024

An enjoyable buddy flick with strong performances from Mahershala Ali and Viggo Mortensen, it’s a shame the plot ends up being so passé – as well intentioned and entertaining as it is.

Full Review | Jun 27, 2023

Despite good intentions, a promising scenario and fine performances, “Green Book” is the latest version of Hollywood’s “Great White Savior” movie.

Full Review | Dec 7, 2022

The biggest strength lies in the chemistry between Mortensen and Ali. Without it the entire movie would fall apart.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Aug 21, 2022

Green Book is not for the cold-hearted cynic, but for the romantic moviegoer who wants nothing more than to see the good in people and let that feeling wash over them.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 17, 2022

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.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 8, 2022

This is a deftly scripted comedy with a message. Anchored by two outstanding performances, this true story of an unlikely friendship will warm even the most jaded of hearts with its comic look on a dark chapter of American history.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 1, 2021

It's irresponsible and dismissive of the very thing it seemingly wants to talk about.

Full Review | Original Score: 2. 5 / 5 | Jun 25, 2021

With so many other recent movies finding a way to address racial issues in both entertaining and considerate methods, Green Book feels like a wrongheaded throwback. It may give you some good feelings, but its message is only half-baked.

Full Review | Apr 29, 2021

For its humanistic, anti-racialist message-the elementary notion that white and black people can get along-Green Book has been well received by audiences.

Full Review | Feb 17, 2021

Probably could have hit a little harder but its message of unity, of creating bridges rather than walls, is a welcome one in these politically divisive times.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 3, 2021

The two leads are quite impressive, managing to overcome the limitations of their largely stock roles.

Full Review | Original Score: 7/10 | Dec 6, 2020

It's a movie about racism by whites for whites and in a year full of extraordinary films about race by black filmmakers, Green Book sticks out like a sore thumb partially because of that.

Full Review | Oct 2, 2020

it's light and breezy and matter-of-fact and truly, truly entertaining.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4.0 | Sep 9, 2020

Mahershala Ali and Viggo Mortensen are a match made in heaven. In its political correctness, it finds moments of truth. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 8/10 | Sep 2, 2020

"Green Book" is one of those rare crowd pleasers with the chops to go the Oscar distance. It's a film most easily described as a reverse "Driving Miss Daisy" (1989) when really it's so much more than that.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Aug 29, 2020

For the most part it's solid, even though it's about as subtle as a piano falling down a flight of stairs.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 16, 2020

Ali is stuck trying to breathe life into a cardboard cutout of a real person who . . . is left standing like an uncooked noodle who only curdles when the script lets him.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Jul 25, 2020

...the relationship at its core helps to dilute its sentimentality before it overwhelms the film. Like Dr. Shirley, Green Book doesn't sell out entirely, just a little bit.

Full Review | Jul 24, 2020

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Viggo Mortensen and Mahershala Ali make odd-couple story shine in Green Book': EW review

Viggo Mortensen has played nearly everything onscreen — Amish barn raiser, Russian mob fixer, backwoods radical, Tolkien warrior king — but he’s never been a mook. It’s almost impossible to picture the fine-boned Danish-American actor as Tony “Lip” Vallelonga until you see him up there, all marinara-sauced vowels and Brylcreemed hair, working his bada bing like Joe Pesci’s chin-dimpled brother.

As a Bronx security man who agrees to drive a black musician (Mahershala Ali) through the Deep South circa 1962, he has by far the showiest role in Peter Farrelly’s winning dramedy, and it might finally earn him the Oscar he’s long deserved. The movie wouldn’t work, though, without the elegant, understated balance of his counterpart.

Ali’s Dr. Don Shirley is a brilliant piano maestro, celebrated in the world’s finest private homes and concert halls — he’s performed twice for the sitting president and lives in a lavish apartment above Carnegie Hall — but he hasn’t ever taken his show below the Mason-Dixon. He also doesn’t quite know what to do with a man like Tony, with his bearish habits and blunt-force personality.

Green Book is inspired by a true story, and the script — written by Farrelly, Brian Currie, and Vallelonga’s real-life son Nick — hits many of the beats you’d expect. The bigotry the pair encounters ranges from politely insidious to outright savage; the odd-couple bonding happens inevitably, in picturesque fits and starts.

But it’s hard to overstate how charming it all is, and how much both actors make the material shine. (Linda Cardellini is great, too, in a small but pivotal role as Tony’s wife.) In a world that seems to get uglier every day, this movie’s gentle heart and mere humanity feel like a salve. B+

Related content:

• See the stars of AFI Fest in EW and Audi’s portrait studio
• Green Book team on why the film’s ‘feel-good’ label ‘makes it sound squeakier-clean than it is

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Common sense media reviewers.

Crowd-pleasing drama explores race, class, friendship.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

Positive messages related to race, class, discrimi

Dr. Shirley is a genius, a world-class musician wh

Fistfight after verbal confrontation in and in fro

A married couple hugs and kisses. Two people who w

Frequent language includes two uses of "f--k," plu

Brands used to establish historical accuracy inclu

Tony smokes cigarettes constantly. A woman sells c

Parents need to know that Green Book is a drama set in the 1960s about a racist Italian American man (Viggo Mortensen) who takes a temporary job chauffeuring an acclaimed black pianist (Mahershala Ali) during his concert tour of the Midwest and Deep South. Called by some a "race-flipped Driving Miss Daisy…

Positive Messages

Positive messages related to race, class, discrimination. Encourages people to look beyond prejudices to see people as individuals, not stereotypes. Even if some stereotypes apply (Tony is Italian and does like pasta and pizza), they shouldn't be assumed (Dr. Shirley has never eaten fried chicken). Argues that individual connection and friendship can break down barriers, discrimination, racism. Empathy a clear theme.

Positive Role Models

Dr. Shirley is a genius, a world-class musician who takes the time to help Tony better himself. He's also an example of a man doing his best to defy stereotypes about black men in Jim Crow South. Tony doesn't allow his racism to get in the way of taking the job, connecting with Dr. Shirley. They learn to look past prejudices and form an unlikely bond.

Violence & Scariness

Fistfight after verbal confrontation in and in front of nightclub. A black man gets beaten up in a bar for no reason. Tony threatens to pull out a gun to defend Dr. Shirley; bartender then pulls out shotgun. Police officer stops Tony and Dr. Shirley's car; after Tony punches cop, cop arrests both men, making veiled threats about "boy" being "his." Men who engaged in sexual activity are caught, handcuffed.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

A married couple hugs and kisses. Two people who were engaging in sexual activity are shown after the fact, naked but curled up so that no sensitive body parts are shown.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Frequent language includes two uses of "f--k," plus "goddamn," "s--t," "a--hole," "bulls--t," "son of a bitch," "Jesus Christ," "bastard," "pr--k," "t-ts," "hell," "crap," and "garbage." "Christ" as an exclamation. Also many racial epithets: "eggplant," "coon," "boy," the "N" word, "chink," "spool," "kraut," "stooge," and "brillo pad," as well as "wop," "guinea" and "hillbilly." The word "colored" is used to describe black people.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Products & Purchases

Brands used to establish historical accuracy include Cadillac, Cutty Sark whisky, Steinway pianos, Kentucky Fried Chicken.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Tony smokes cigarettes constantly. A woman sells cigarettes at a club. Adults drink alcohol in bars at meals, parties, and by themselves. Dr. Shirley drinks from a bottle of whiskey (presumably nearly the entire bottle) every night. He gets drunk at a bar.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Green Book is a drama set in the 1960s about a racist Italian American man ( Viggo Mortensen ) who takes a temporary job chauffeuring an acclaimed black pianist ( Mahershala Ali ) during his concert tour of the Midwest and Deep South. Called by some a "race-flipped Driving Miss Daisy ," the crowd-pleasing story explores how the two men had to abide by the titular Green Book, a "traveling while black" guide to restaurants and accommodations that allowed black guests in the '60s. Characters get beaten and threatened (including with a shotgun), there's a fistfight, and two men are handcuffed after being caught engaging in sexual activity (nothing sensitive shown). There's also quite a bit of language (including "s--t," the "N" word, and more) and drinking/smoking. But the film's messages about empathy and the danger of prejudice and stereotypes are important and thought-provoking. And the story is a timely reminder of how, just a few decades ago, there were whole parts of the country where segregation kept African Americans from fully participating in civic life. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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Based on 20 parent reviews

The review for "Sex, Romance & Nudity" is technically correct but intentionally misleading.

What's the story.

Inspired by a true story, GREEN BOOK takes place in 1962 and follows Tony "Lip" Vallelonga ( Viggo Mortensen ), a white, Italian American New York City bouncer who takes a temporary job driving black concert pianist Dr. Don Shirley ( Mahershala Ali ) as he travels throughout the Midwest and the Deep South on a concert tour. The movie's title refers to a (now historical) guide for what Tony calls "traveling while black": The Green Book is a directory of restaurants and accommodations that cater to African Americans throughout the segregated South. As the vulgar, working-class, and admittedly racist Tony and the incredibly well-educated, intelligent Dr. Shirley get to know each other on the road, they challenge stereotypes and grow to form an unlikely friendship. But the farther into the South they travel, the more they're forced to deal with everything from Jim Crow laws to hate crimes.

Is It Any Good?

Mortensen and Ali both give fabulous performances in this feel-good road-trip drama that's part buddy comedy, part history lesson, and part social commentary on friendship and race. Director Peter Farrelly , best known for raunchy comedies like There's Something About Mary , brings out the humor in Tony and Dr. Shirley's interactions; he allows the actors to shine in completely opposing ways. Mortensen, who reportedly gained more than 30 pounds for the role, immerses himself in showy Bronx bravado, while Ali is a picture of nuanced restraint, with plenty of emotion simmering beneath the surface. Both portrayals are award-worthy, as are Ali's musical performances (he went through extensive piano training to pull them off).

It's not easy to revisit a time in history when gifted black artists could entertain all-white crowds but not sit or dine among them -- or even use the same bathroom. Dr. Shirley refuses to lower himself via vulgarity or even by listening to popular music (he can't tell Aretha Franklin from Chubby Checker), and he fully understands that the moment he steps off stage, he's just another black man to the white audiences who moments earlier applauded his talent. While Tony isn't in the role of the dreaded "white savior," Green Book 's story is more about him than Dr. Shirley, who's infinitely more self-aware -- and also more of a mystery. It feels like a bit of a missed opportunity that Dr. Shirley's personal life isn't explored via more than a couple of references to his estranged brother and a failed marriage and one poignant monologue about not fitting into either white or black society. Especially considering that viewers meet nearly all of Tony's large Italian family, including his more open-minded wife, Dolores ( Linda Cardellini ), to whom he writes (with help from Dr. Shirley) increasingly poetic love letters from the road. Really, the entire movie is a love letter of sorts -- to a friendship that's a reminder that the world needs more empathy and human connection ... not to mention mind-blowing music.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about the violence in Green Book . What effect does it have? What does it mean for the story? What's the impact of media violence on kids?

How does the movie address and handle the topics of race and segregation? What about class? How does Dr. Shirley defy others' prejudices and expectations?

Which characters do you consider role models ? What character strengths do they display? How do both main characters show empathy ?

Some have criticized the movie for the fact that, despite the title, it focuses more on Tony's life than Dr. Shirley's. And some of Dr. Shirley's relatives have taken issue with how he's portrayed in the film. Why do you think filmmakers might choose to alter facts when making a movie? How can you find out more about what happened?

How have things changed since the movie's 1960s setting? How haven't they?

Movie Details

• In theaters : November 16, 2018
• On DVD or streaming : March 12, 2019
• Cast : Viggo Mortensen , Mahershala Ali , Linda Cardellini
• Director : Peter Farrelly
• Inclusion Information : Black actors, Female actors
• Studio : Universal Pictures
• Genre : Drama
• Topics : History
• Character Strengths : Empathy
• Run time : 130 minutes
• MPAA rating : PG-13
• MPAA explanation : thematic content, language including racial epithets, smoking, some violence and suggestive material
• Awards : Academy Award , Common Sense Selection , Golden Globe
• Last updated : December 15, 2022

Did we miss something on diversity?

Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

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The Truth About Green Book

By K. Austin Collins

A surprising word keeps popping up on the press tour for Peter Farrelly’s Green Book. The word is “truth.”

The movie hasn’t exactly been a runaway hit—its box-office take-home has been slow but steady , with encouraging signs of growth over the past couple of weekends. Maybe awards momentum has something to do with that. Last week, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association honored Green Book with five Golden Globe nominations, in acting (for both Viggo Mortensen and Mahershala Ali ), writing, direction, and for best musical/comedy. The National Board of Review had already dubbed it best picture of the year, and the American Film Institute ranked it among their top 10 for the year. Audiences at the Toronto Film Festival, meanwhile, had already given it the People’s Choice Award over a crowded lineup of movies that included Bradley Cooper’s A Star Is Born .

Some of that is undoubtedly thanks to the movie’s subject matter—and its veneer of truthfulness. “There’s a lot of stories about racism that have been told, are being told, and should still be told,” said Nick Vallelonga , one of the film’s screenwriters, in one interview. “It happened to my father the way it happened.” Vallelonga is son of the film’s protagonist, Tony “Lip” Vallelonga—an Italian-American bouncer played by Mortensen who gets hired to escort a black pianist, Dr. Don Shirley (Ali), on a tour of the Jim Crow South in 1962. They travel in a delectably suave teal Cadillac befitting Shirley’s kingly stature and brisk demeanor.

The idea is that though Shirley is an esteemed cultural figure, this status won’t mean much to the era’s “sundown towns”—all-white municipalities with strict legal and social codes dictating who belongs. Tony Lip is there for protection. “I don’t want to manipulate that,” Nick Vallelonga said of his approach to the script. “I don’t want to do anything but the truth.”

“Every single event in this movie actually happened,” writer and producer Brian Currie told The Hollywood Reporter —including an astonishing incident in which Shirley leans on Robert F. Kennedy to get him and Lip sprung from prison. “Everything was real. I’ve known Tony Lip for 25 years. I’ve heard the stories. They’re all true. This is a true story.”

So Green Book isn’t merely inspired by history, we’re told, or based on a true story: it is the “true story,” written by family, and furthermore, it depicts a “true friendship.” Certainly there are nuggets of historical reality to acknowledge here: Tony Lip really was an Italian-American bouncer from Paramus, New Jersey, who worked the Copacabana before being hired to escort Dr. Shirley on a tour of the South. Dr. Shirley, meanwhile, really was a concert and jazz pianist—an outright prodigy, who, as the movie depicts, lived with regal splendor in an apartment above Carnegie Hall. That 1962 road trip undergone by the two men? That really happened too, though it lasts about two months in the film while, in real life, it lasted about a year. Importantly, the two mens’ friendship is said to have lasted until they died four months apart in 2013.

You’d think that would give Farrelly and his team a lot to work with. This is a decades-long friendship we’re talking about, with a script written by the son of the lead character—who, though he was only 5 years old in 1962, has said he remembers visiting Shirley atop Carnegie Hall as a kid. There should be ample opportunity for intimate familial realities to sneak their way into the movie. Vallelonga still has tapes of his father recounting incidents he ended up including in the script.

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It should be no wonder, then, that Mortensen had a decisive leg up when it came to fleshing out his character. “I brought [Mortensen] in to my family, and he hung out with us,” Vallelonga told Screen Rant. “We ate at my brother’s house. We ate at my uncle’s house. . . . He had the audio tapes of my father, video of my father.” Linda Cardellini, who plays Dolores Vallelonga—Tony Lip’s wife and Nick Vallelonga’s mother—was decked out in her character’s actual jewelry, including her wedding band.

But by all accounts, Mahershala Ali had no such real-life contact with Dr. Shirley’s family. “I had a documentary ( Little Bohemia ), where I saw him, that was about Carnegie Hall,” Ali told The Hollywood Reporter . But that, and Shirley’s music, seem to have been about it. “There are these tapes that exist that are about 25 years old of Tony Vallelonga speaking at length,” Ali said. He, on the other hand, “just pulled and gathered whatever I could.”

This disparity has its advantages for a skilled actor like Ali; by relying only on vague clues, Ali could reimagine the character through his own performance. Which is, for the record, beautiful: his Shirley is monied, erudite, and slickly sophisticated, with a sly sucking-in that make his cheekbones sharp with superiority. Despite being a black man in the 60s, Shirley, as Ali plays him, has no qualms about his social status.

As depicted in Farrelly’s film, though, Shirley also feels alienated from his own blackness, and from other black people—perhaps thanks to the mostly white audience his immense talents have earned him, or perhaps because of his sexuality (he is, we discover, a gay man), or maybe because of his relative class privilege compared to the Southern blacks we see throughout Green Book. He is, we’re told, completely divorced from his own family: a lonely, isolated genius, and an alcoholic to boot. When staying at a black-friendly motel, he holds himself apart from other blacks, wearing his fine clothing and turning up his nose. It isn’t until an Italian guy with a Bronx accent practically shoves it into his mouth that he eats fried chicken for the first time (another incident Vallelonga says happened in real life as it does in the movie).

Perhaps most outlandishly, Dr. Shirley—a pianist with ties to Duke Ellington, who was admired by Sarah Vaughan and Igor Stravinsky, and whose style combined American popular music with his own classical interests—is not familiar with Aretha Franklin or, most surprisingly, a piano player known as Little Richard, until their music plays on the radio during his and Vallelonga’s road trip.

Much of what is wrong with Green Book can be attributed to these “truths”—and most of all, to our willingness to believe them.

Not that they’re automatically un -true. Really, the problem is more specific: Tony Lip drew an impression of Dr. Shirley for his friends and family, and in the making of Green Book, no one seemed to question whether those impressions were honest. No one ever seemed to wonder if Shirley’s family might want a say, too. ( At TIFF , Nick Vallelonga said he interviewed Shirley before making the film.)

Then the film came out—and the Shirley camp began to speak up. In November, Maurice Shirley, Dr. Shirley’s only living brother, sent a strongly worded missive to publications nationwide, dismissing Green Book ’s abundance of counter-factuals. Some of the claims dismissed seem minor (“My brother NEVER had a teal blue Cadillac, it was always a black limousine”); others are major. For one thing, Maurice said, Dr. Shirley was not cut off from his family. He was the best man at Maurice’s wedding in 1964, two years after Green Book is set.

And he’d definitely eaten fried chicken before. At the very least, his brother said, he never would have let a white man egg him into eating it. As the movie rightly knows and attempts to dismiss with good humor and a playful wink, loving fried chicken is a black stereotype. As the film also knows and harps on, Dr. Shirley was a man of strict social propriety. Eating the chicken to overcome racial friction in that teal Cadillac makes for a good story, but it severely undercuts the politics of respectability that Shirley otherwise, and much more interestingly, goes out of his way to embody.

The most telling counterclaim of them all: Tony Lip and Dr. Shirley were not friends. “My brother never considered Tony to be his ‘friend,’” wrote Shirley. “He was an employee, his chauffeur (who resented wearing a uniform and cap). This is why context and nuance are so important. The fact that a successful, well-to-do Black artist would employ domestics that did NOT look like him, should not be lost in translation.”

The artistic and political success of any film “based on a true story” doesn’t hinge entirely on absolute historical accuracy. But the debate over the truth of Green Book fascinates me because of all of the unquestioned assumptions—and the presumptions—undertaken by Farrelly and crew in their design of Dr. Shirley’s character.

It’s really something. Everyone seems to agree that Tony Lip had a, shall we say, limited view of black Americans before meeting Shirley. According to his son , he was “a product of his times. Italians lived with Italians. The Irish lived with the Irish. African-Americans lived with African-Americans.” The trip with Dr. Shirley, Vallelonga said, “opened my father’s eyes . . . and then changed how he treated people.”

Linda Cardellini as Dolores Vallelonga and Viggo Mortensen as Tony Vallelonga in Green Book .

Yet it is this man’s account that became the basis for an entire film—this account which, from his screenwriter son’s own admission, is informed by a limited, very 1960s, very white understanding of race. Though unreliable on its face, this understanding becomes our lens into the history of this specific black man.

But what, really, could Tony Lip have possibly known, or understood, about Shirley’s alienation from his own blackness? A quick glimpse at Shirley’s biography provides some hints. Shirley, per The New York Times , “had a love-hate relationship with jazz,” according to a friend. He refused to be called a jazz musician; he was a hybrid. If what we’re dealing with are black stereotypes as ways of understanding black people, maybe this is what Tony Lip sensed: a rejection of jazz as a rejection of blackness. (This, even though Shirley was also a student of black American musical forms, such as the Negro spiritual).

And maybe what Tony Lip read as Dr. Shirley’s reticence about his family—believing he was completely isolated from them—was really Shirley’s careful insistence on maintaining a boundary between himself and his employee. Maybe class dictated that boundary, and rather than reckoning with or subjugating himself to it—rather than confronting the ability of a black man to have such power, in the first place—Tony Lip thought up an alternative explanation.

Maybe this, maybe that: there are many gaps here. You can see why Vallelonga and his co-writers felt they had to fill them in. Inevitably, the material they chose to do so resulted in a less prickly and, frankly, less interesting movie: I would love to see a version of Green Book that confronted Dr. Shirley’s class privilege head-on.

Even then, knowing all of this deflates my consternation with the film to some degree. Once you realize Green Book is really just Nick Vallelonga’s attempt to make a film out of the nifty road-trip stories his dad shared with him as a kid, the movie’s myopia is somehow harder to be mad at. It’s boneheaded, perhaps, but it’s not malicious.

Rather, that’s how I feel until I remember the sickening ways that the film fabricates Dr. Shirley’s feelings towards other blacks, his lack of black cultural knowledge, his utter racial isolation—falsehoods, according to his brother. Then I’m taken aback. It’s one thing to get historical facts wrong, or to massage them for the sake of dramatic coherence. It’s another thing entirely to take something so essential as racial identity—as the inner life of a person of color—and revise it. And to bypass due diligence. And to think, as a white filmmaker, that questions of this sort are things you can blithely make up or change outright.

Black performers touring the U.S. in the middle of the 20th century faced fearsome amounts of racism, not in the abstract, and not just in the South: Nat King Cole was attacked onstage , in Alabama, by members of the Ku Klux Klan. That was in 1956. Dr. Shirley himself faced such an incident in 1963, in Wisconsin, when he encountered a sign at the town’s limits that advised him and other blacks not to stick around after dark.

Imagine, then, revising a black man's feelings about his identity relative to such violent currents and racial antagonism. You are fundamentally revising an essential political fact of who that black man is. You are re-writing the story of how he feels about his race at a time when that race could not be more of a cultural or physical liability. You are, in effect, re-writing that identity. This is, to my mind, a fairly brash thing for a white filmmaker to do—and to do it so casually, so unknowingly, to boot.

It’s a different form of historical malpractice than the kind we usually complain about—one far more dangerous than getting the color of Dr. Shirley’s car wrong. And in the first place, it’s worth remembering that of these two men, Dr. Shirley has a substantially larger claim to true historical significance. This is the biting irony at the heart the film’s premise: Tony Lip may have gone on to have a walk-on role in The Godfather and a recurring mob-boss role in The Sopranos, but Dr. Shirley was a virtuoso recording artist—albeit under-acknowledged and not widely-enough known. He’s the guy with Robert F. Kennedy’s phone number. His is the story here that has history, writ large, to contend with—he’s here because he was exceptional, not because he told his future screenwriting son the right bedtime stories.

Tony Lip is the historical footnote—not, despite the awkwardly rejiggered emphasis of this movie, the other way around. This doesn't mean his life isn't worth a movie—if anything, movies routinely prove that the footnotes and side-stories are where the juice is. But getting Shirley’s story wrong is getting something bigger than one character wrong, even if he isn't the focus here. It’s a token of bad faith. It's his historical peculiarity, after all, that makes this particular tale of racial reconciliation stand out from a crowded field of similar Hollywood stories. He is what makes this tale worth telling, what makes it an enticing sell. Who will tell his story?

Green Book purports to be about racial reconciliation, a popular sentiment among people who want everyone , holding hands, to take responsibility for ending white supremacy—not just its beneficiaries. It’s a troubling, tedious idea, but a very common one—rooted, I think, in a desire to be forgiven. A desire for a leveled playing field, wiped clean of guilt. One way to do that is to make films like this, which make a show of progress in the same instant that they ultimately evince the opposite. I keep thinking back to Maurice Shirley’s claim that Tony Lip and Dr. Shirley were not friends. It’s a profound idea: that, by implication, there was nothing for the two of them to reconcile. That there was nothing to be forgiven for—that the ties between us could just as well not even exist.

This article has been updated.

Editor’s Note: Screenwriter Nick Vallelonga has previously discussed having interviews ahead of Green Book with both his father and Dr. Shirley.

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Book Review: ‘The Darkness Over Arkham’ by Jonathan Green

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Arkham is in danger (again). Three different cults are warring to fulfill a prophecy and ensure that their god is the one that rises and rules the world. The only thing standing between them and Arkham is you. And in The Darkness Over Arkham, you really are the protector of Arkham. Jonathan Green has crafted a choose-your-own-adventure book with a twist. Can you make the right choices and save the world? Or will it all end in doom?

[Note: While I am reviewing this novel independently and honestly, it should be noted that it has been provided to me by Aconyte for the purpose of this review. Warning: My review of this book   contains some spoilers! ]

Choose-your-own-adventure in The Darkness Over Arkham

I have reviewed a few other choose-your-own-adventure game books from Aconyte in the past ( She-Hulk , Deadpool ), but this is the first Arkham Horror gamebook. I’ve always liked how they upped the ante by making it more involved than just “pick a number”. There are many different paths to choose from, but dice rolls, items acquired, and attributes affect what happens. This turns a simple book into a game and makes it more exciting. 

In The Darkness Over Arkham ,  Green adds another twist. Instead of starting off with a single character template, there are three different characters you can choose from. Agnes Baker is a waitress, Nathaniel Cho is a boxer, and Rex Murphy is a reporter.

The different characters all start out with different stats, strengths, and weaknesses that affect gameplay. This means that if you choose different characters, you’ll get different options and play, even if you make all the same decisions. This extra level of nuance made the reading extra fun. Trying to decide which character would be most helpful in which circumstances was both fun and (at times) frustrating, but always interesting.

Some books are great for relaxing with. You can sit down and just space out with them. The Darkness Over Arkham is not one of those books. This is a book you choose when a) you have at least thirty minutes to devote to reading, and b) want to be very actively engaged. In other words, when you’re in the mood to play a game, not just read. 

Preparation and best tactics to play while reading this game book

To play The Darkness Over Arkham , you need to have a six-sided die (I used Google’s roll a die), paper and pencil (I used my note app, but also ended up writing in the book for some of it, so I still needed a pencil). The pencil and paper help to keep track of the different items you pick up and your ever-changing attributes. 

In The Darkness Over Arkham, each character starts out with a certain level of willpower, intellect, combat, health and sanity. These base levels go up and down during the reading depending on what you encounter and how those encounters go. In addition, you have to keep track of major abilities, major weaknesses, and other abilities and weaknesses. Plus, you can pick up items as you go, and you’ll want to remember them. 

Not to mention, there are many different puzzles to solve throughout The Darkness Over Arkham . There are codes to crack and mazes to traverse. It was way easier to solve these puzzles when I wrote directly in the book. Sure, then it was already solved the next time I came thorough, but that just saved time since the answer was always going to be the same.

Of course, you could totally cheat and just choose what you want to do without actually playing the game. But that would defeat the entire purpose of reading a book like The Darkness Over Arkham . It’d be like playing Monopoly and giving yourself all the money and properties right off the bat. Totally pointless and not much fun.

Personally, I loved the level of surprise that the gameplay gave to the read throughs. I could make all the right choices, but chance had a huge say in my outcomes (I’m starting to think that Google was rolling a 3 sided die, not a six!).

And if that wasn’t enough to keep you occupied, there are two more, let’s call them, achievement lists to work on while you play. There’s the secrets checklist and there’s the super-secrets checklist. The secrets checklist is a list of secrets that you come across as you read. There’s no way to know where you’ll find these, so the only way to check off the entire list is to play over and over, choosing different paths each time.

The super -secret checklist is a little different. The secrets mostly include finishing the game with different status, item, and ability combinations. There are other types of super-secrets, but they all are related to gameplay as opposed to just reading a certain section. Getting all the secrets and all the super-secrets is definitely a long-term project that will take tons of read-throughs, but the feeling of accomplishment when you check off the last one will be worth it!

Many different endings, not so many different outcomes for this Arkham Horror book

The Darkness Over Arkham has over twenty different endings. And in true Arkham style, only a handful can actually be called happy endings. A couple more are kinda neutral endings, not good but not quite bad. The rest are decidedly bad. Even though I love happy endings, I understand with this series why so many of the stories ended in doom. Even if I thought I did everything right, the eldritch powers often won. But since Arkham is a horror series, that makes sense.

What bothered me more was that even though there were over 20 different endings, a lot of the endings were virtually identical. I actually had to flip back and check the first time because I thought it was the same ending I had already gotten, but it was on a different page.

This cut the number of different endings way down. Sure, technically there were over 20 endings, but it felt like there were only about 5 different endings because so many of them were nearly identical. I felt like this was a bit of a cop out, and I didn’t like it. Green has written plenty of different books for Aconyte, so I know he’s capable of writing good endings. I just wish he had written a few more for The Darkness Over Arkham.

Final thoughts on The Darkness Over Arkham by Jonathan Green 

Even if I feel like the endings could have been improved on, I really liked this latest offering from the Arkham Horror line. The story was engaging and exciting, with mystery and adventure everywhere. Jonathan Green does a great job keeping things interesting.

I also really liked having the smaller puzzles to solve. They were like having mini-games within the game, and who doesn’t love a good mini-game? I thought having the three different characters to choose from at the beginning also really improved the adventure. It made the game play even more customizable and added a level of planning to the game that is missing when you just always start off with the same stats. 

Now, this The Darkness Over Arkham probably isn’t something you’re going to just grab off the shelf to kick back with. And it’s certainly not a quick five-minute read “here and there when you squeeze it in” book. What I really see this book being good for is rainy days. Or maybe for vacations, especially say, camping or the beach. When there are days when you just can’t go outside, and you need something to distract you. It would be perfect for that.

I could see multiple people playing together too, making decisions together as they read the pages out loud. I actually think that could be a lot of fun to do. Almost a simple version of Dungeons and Dragons where everyone is the same character. 

Rating: 8/10

Jonathan Green’s The Darkness Over Arkham is now available where books are sold.   You can also find a preview and other information on Fantasy Flight Games website. Are you planning to check this book out? Let us know on social media @mycosmiccircus or in The Cosmic Circus Discord. 

Book Review: The Bootlegger’s Dance: An Arkham Horror Novel by Rosemary Jones

Book Review: A Kingdom of Souls and Shadows by Leslie O’Sullivan

Luna Gauthier

I've always been a bookworm and fantasy is my favortie genre. I never imagined (okay, I imagined but I didn't think) that I could get those books sent to me for just my opinion. Now I am a very happy bookworm! @Lunagauthier19 on Twitter

Luna Gauthier has 217 posts and counting. See all posts by Luna Gauthier

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A Former ‘Green Book’ Hotel in North Carolina Has Been Lovingly Restored — And You Can Still Stay There

The Historic Magnolia House honors its past as a Green Book hotel while offering thoughtfully appointed rooms and delectable Southern food.

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Experiences and amenities, accessibility.

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The Historic Magnolia House isn't just any ordinary bed-and-breakfast.

This Victorian-Italianate home dates back to 1898, but its vital role in Black history started in 1949 when the Gist family purchased the abode and turned it into a hotel that would welcome Black travelers. One of the few options with quality accommodations between Atlanta and Richmond, Virginia, during segregation, the property would become recognized in six editions of the Green Book starting in 1955.

Now, the Historic Magnolia House is one of America's last fully restored hotels of its kind.

In the decades following the Jim Crow era, the home began to slowly fall to the wayside. Samuel Penn Pass, who grew up in the neighborhood just around the corner, purchased the property in 1995 hoping to return it to its former glory. "However, it was in very bad condition," recalls Pass's daughter, Natalie Pass-Miller. "Squatters and the homeless community had taken over the home," she adds. The house had to be gutted to be stabilized and secured. By the time Pass-Miller and her husband, Devin Miller, acquired the Historic Magnolia House in 2018, there were still some necessary touches that needed to be made before it could be re-opened as a functioning B&B once more.

In January 2022, the Historic Magnolia House finally made its grand return. For Pass-Miller, carrying on her family's legacy was undoubtedly a driving force when it came to taking on this exceptional project, but it's almost much more than that. "Preserving Black historic sites, reuniting them in their communities on a national level, . . . and being able to give back to the [low-income] community that [she] grew up in" were also significant factors. Ultimately, it's this fervor for conservation and local betterment that reverberates through the walls of the Historic Magnolia House.

Historic Magnolia House

• Events throughout the year honor Black musicians, bring together the community and offer guests the opportunity to interact with locals.
• The food here is comforting, delicious, and soulful — Southern cooking at its best.
• The four bold and colorful rooms have been individually designed to pay homage to famous past guests.

The passion is palpable from the moment you step foot into the hotel. The staff's genuine desire to welcome all guests creates this sense of warmth that can only be likened to how one would feel in a fond, familiar place. Color-blocked interiors are reminiscent of a quirky but loving aunt or grandmother's home, a comforting feeling that's only heightened when the smell of butter and spices wafts out from the kitchen. Meanwhile, the museum-like living room is a reminder of the fight for basic civil rights for Black Americans while also honoring the fortitude of the Black community and the hotel's former proprietors. The Historic Magnolia House is not just any B&B — it's a home, it's a national treasure.

Read on for our full review.

Swathed in striking colors with various textures and midcentury modern accents, the four rooms at the Historic Magnolia House each have their own personality and have been dedicated to the property's past venerable visitors.

The chic black-and-white Baldwin room is a tribute to writers and intellectuals such as James Baldwin and Carter G. Woodson and features a vintage Smith-Corona typewriter on the desk. In Legends, a more “masculine” touch of plaid wallpaper, leather throw pillows, dark wood, and overt adornments like boxing gloves and baseball mitts remember athletes like heavyweight champion Ezzard Charles and baseball icon Jackie Robinson. Contrastingly, Carlotta's hot pink décor honors Queens of Soul Tina Turner, Lena Horne, and Gladys Knight while also nodding to Greensboro's erstwhile Carlotta Club, an important music venue that was part of the Chitlin' Circuit.

Then, there's Kind of Blue, inspired by Miles Davis' album of the same name, which is an homage to the friendship between the musician and Buddy Gist, the son of the hotel's original owners. The largest of the four, the cobalt-hued room is the only option with a private bathroom and shower. In keeping with an authentic Green Book hotel experience, the other three accommodations have access to shared bathrooms like guests would have during the Jim Crow era.

As expected with any B&B, breakfast is included, and this is one worth staying for.

A force to be reckoned with, Brooklyn-born Yancey Williams served as a combat Navy cook and later graduated top of his class from the Institute of Culinary Education. During the pandemic, the chef found his way down to North Carolina, where he ran the kitchen at UNC Greensboro before becoming a one-man crew at the Historic Magnolia House. The menu changes seasonally, but expect Southern classics like fried green tomatoes, chicken and waffles, and buttery grits.

If you stay on a Friday, hop down for supper and order the oxtail. Braised for six hours, the meat is so ridiculously tender that if a strong gust of wind found its way through the dining room, it'd likely fall right off the bone. A small selection of spirits, cocktails, and wine are also available to wash it all down. But one word of advice: portions are generous, so come with a healthy appetite and perhaps some stretchy pants.

Given the legendary musicians who have walked through the doors of the Historic Magnolia House, it is no surprise that music is at the core of the property's programming. "Because there is such a rich history as it relates to the musical arts . . . it was only right to establish a program in honor of such," says Pass-Miller. "Juke Joint [is tailored] toward the Black history and Black excellence in music and the culture of the arts."

Every Friday night, live jazz performed by members of the UNCG band floats through the home. A local DJ headlines a near-monthly party with house music. But watch for marquee events throughout the year, ranging from tribute concerts to art showcases.

Otherwise, relax in the lounge with a tipple and some board games, enjoy friendly conversation with other guests, or get to know the staff, who all have interesting stories. But you can't leave without exploring the museum-like first floor, where you'll find several informational placards centered around the hotel's history, excerpts from the Green Book , and even the original motel sign above the reception desk.

Due to the property's historic nature, the B&B does not offer ADA-compliant accommodations. All four rooms are located on the home's second floor, which is only accessible by stairs.

While you're in Greensboro, take the opportunity to brush up on history. On Feb. 1, 1960, four North Carolina A&T State University students sat down at Woolworth's, a whites-only lunch counter, marking the beginning of non-violent protests known as sit-ins. Today, that landmark is now the International Civil Rights Center & Museum, commemorating the site and participants of the historic moment, along with many other significant events during the Civil Rights Movement.

For American Revolution buffs, the Guilford Courthouse National Military Park was the scene for the historic namesake battle in 1781 that, while it was a loss on paper, ultimately led to pushing the British out of the Carolinas.

If you're interested in the arts, the Steven Tanger Center for the Performing Arts hosts everything from Broadway productions to comedy shows, while downtown Greensboro, just a couple minutes from the Historic Magnolia House, is decorated with murals for public enjoyment.

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‘Turtles All the Way Down’ Review: 10 Things I Hate About Germs

Hannah Marks’s adaptation of John Green’s blockbuster young-adult novel builds a dynamic depiction of a teenager with obsessive-compulsive disorder.

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By Natalia Winkelman

The assured coming-of-age film “Turtles All the Way Down,” based on John Green’s blockbuster young-adult novel of the same name , takes its title from an apocryphal story: An older woman at a science lecture posits that the Earth rests on the shell of a tortoise, which in turn sits on the back of a larger tortoise, and so on, to infinity.

A never-ending stack of reptiles is an evocative image and an expressive paradox. It’s especially fitting for “Turtles,” a movie based on a book propped up by an ever-expanding young-adult canon that traffics in the romance of pain and the pain of romance. (Which came first in that sequence of romance and pain? It’s turtles all the way down.)

Directed by Hannah Marks ( “Don’t Make Me Go” ), the movie centers on Aza (Isabela Merced), a teenager with obsessive-compulsive disorder whose contamination anxieties are impeding her ability to build intimacy with others. These struggles grow urgent once Aza reconnects with Davis (Felix Mallard), a childhood friend who wants to be more than that. She likes him back, but panics at the thought of kissing him; brushing lips would mean swapping bacteria.

Aza squirms through this dilemma in sessions with her therapist (Poorna Jagannathan) and on hangouts with her gregarious best friend, Daisy (Cree, a scene stealer). But other than Aza’s daily dose of anxiety, which often prompts her to prick at her finger until it bleeds, much of the movie wants for conflict. When the story begins, Davis’s ultrarich father has gone missing, but even that great mystery is less a source of forward momentum than an excuse for our teenage lovebirds to frolic without supervision.

The movie’s ambling, novelistic rhythms might have passed muster had the movie filled its empty spaces with strongly delineated characters. As is, only Aza emerges fully formed; the handsome Davis is more statuette than human, and Daisy mostly suffers a bad case of Sidekick syndrome: pluck without complexity. A hasty third act tries to frame the movie as a friendship love story, redirecting attention from the trials of smooching to the value of mutual support. But the efforts feel like too little, too late.

What “Turtles” does offer in surplus is texture, thanks to Marks’s springy, stylish direction. Any time Aza confronts a thought spiral about germs, Marks pairs voice-over of Aza’s frantic inner monologue with images of neon-colored microbes writhing in a petri dish. These moments are intrusive and unsettling, and together form one of the more dynamically authentic on-screen depictions of O.C.D. that I’ve seen.

Like many adolescent stories of this subgenre, the movie’s central question hangs on identity and its enigmas. Among Aza’s deepest worries — and this brings us back to the turtles — is that her personhood is like a Russian doll: a series of empty casings with nothing at the core. What makes Aza Aza ? Is O.C.D. an essential part of who she is, or is it holding her back from her true self? “Turtles,” to its credit, never locates a specious source of Aza’s troubles, nor does it try to unveil a solution to her suffering.

Turtles All the Way Down Rated PG-13 for debilitating anxiety and other adolescent woes. Running time: 1 hour 51 minutes. Watch on Max.

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Treasury issues fy 2025 green book: proposes changes for late pfic qef election.

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U.S. taxpayers with investments in passive foreign investment companies (“PFICs”) often face complex and punitive tax rules. Under the default PFIC taxing regime, taxpayers must pay taxes at the highest ordinary income rates applicable to the taxpayer’s holding period. In addition, taxpayers must pay interest charges.

Taxpayers may avoid ordinary income rates and the interest charge by making certain elections, including a qualified election fund (QEF) election. Regrettably, however, taxpayers often miss the deadline to make a timely these elections. Although taxpayers may make a retroactive QEF election in certain instances, the procedures to accomplish retroactive relief are daunting and relatively expensive.

Recently, Treasury proposed a legislative fix to the retroactive QEF relief rules in its “ Green Book ” for the 2025 fiscal year. Under the proposal, the IRS would have broader authority to permit taxpayers to make a retroactive QEF election. Because the proposal would provide welcome relief to taxpayers with PFICs, it is worth following to see whether it will gain any traction in Congress.

PFICs Generally

Generally, a foreign corporation is a PFIC if the corporation earns 75% or more of its income from passive income sources ( e.g. , interest, dividends, etc.) or holds 50% or more of its assets for the production of passive income. These tests are performed annually. Therefore, a foreign corporation that is not a PFIC in one tax year may later become a PFIC in a subsequent tax year. When this occurs, the corporation generally remains a PFIC, even it later falls outside both the passive income and passive asset tests in subsequent tax years.

Because there is no threshold stock ownership requirement applicable to PFICs, it is easy for U.S. taxpayers to own PFICs. Indeed, because PFIC status often applies to many forms of popular foreign investments—including mutual funds and ETFs—it is not difficult for taxpayers to become entangled within the PFIC tax regime.

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Congress enacted the PFIC tax rules to prevent U.S. taxpayers from enjoying deferral on federal income taxes through holding investments in foreign corporations. Under these rules, a U.S. taxpayer may continue to defer federal taxes until certain recognition events occur (referred to as “excess distributions”). However, when recognition is required—generally due to distributions from the PFIC or the sale of the PFIC company—taxpayers must pay taxes on the highest applicable ordinary tax rates associated with the PFIC holding period. In addition, the income is deemed allocated on a pro-rata basis over the taxpayer’s holding period in the PFIC with the taxpayer liable for underpayment interest on such amounts.

As mentioned above, Congress designed the PFIC rules to penalize the deferral of taxes. Therefore, Congress created various elections that permit taxpayers an escape from the default rules above, provided those taxpayers pay taxes on income or gains associated with the PFIC on an annual tax basis. A common election—known as a QEF election—permits the taxpayer to report its share of ordinary income and capital gain items annually. Where the election has been made, taxpayers may avoid higher ordinary income tax rates and the interest charges.

Under current law, the QEF election must be made on or before the due date for filing that year’s tax return. If the election is made timely, it is effective from the beginning of the tax year and for all subsequent tax years. Unfortunately, if the foreign corporation was a PFIC in prior tax years, taxpayers must comply with both the PFIC taxation rules and the QEF taxation rules unless a “purging” election is made.

Private Letter Ruling Request

As a general matter, taxpayers prefer to have the QEF election effective as of the first date the foreign corporation became a PFIC. Taxpayers who missed making a timely election for the first tax year are not without options. Under section 1295(b)(2), for example, taxpayers may make a retroactive QEF election if the taxpayer reasonably believed that the company was not a PFIC in prior tax years and relief is permitted under Treasury Regulations.

In many cases, taxpayers only qualify for retroactive QEF relief through filing a request for a private letter ruling (PLR). Under the PLR procedures, taxpayers must show: (i) they relied on a qualified tax professional; (ii) there is no prejudice to the government in granting the request; and (iii) the request for relief was made prior to an IRS agent raising PFIC issues in an examination. The PLR process further requires taxpayers to submit affidavits from their tax professional regarding the professional’s failure to provide correct advice on the PFIC.

The “Green Book” Proposal

In the Green Book, Treasury notes that QEF elections are beneficial to taxpayers and the IRS because such elections promote voluntary compliance. Treasury also notes that taxpayers who seek retroactive QEF relief often incur substantial costs associated with obtaining a PLR, which also results in lost IRS resources as the IRS reviews the PLR submissions.

To correct these inefficiencies and promote voluntary compliance, the Green Book proposes that Congress modify section 1295(b)(2) to grant the IRS broader discretion in approving taxpayer requests for retroactive QEF relief. For example, with section 1295(b)(2) amended, the IRS may grant taxpayers retroactive relief, provided such taxpayers agree to pay all appropriate taxes (even for closed tax years) as if those taxpayers had made timely QEF elections. The elimination of the PLR requirement would save taxpayer and IRS resources.

Treasury’s proposal to relieve the burden on U.S. taxpayers holding PFICs should be welcome news to many taxpayers. Nevertheless, until the proposal is enacted as law, taxpayers who missed making a timely QEF election should consult with their tax professionals to determine the appropriate manner to address the late election. In many cases, filing a PLR may continue to make the most sense. Other options may also be available.

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Green Book review – racially tone-deaf

Mahershala Ali’s performance shines through despite ill-judged moments from director Peter Farrelly

T he first solo film from Peter Farrelly is a step up in ambition from the rambunctiously crude comedies – including Dumb and Dumber and There’s Something About Mary – he directed with his brother Bobby. A flip of the Driving Miss Daisy dynamic, the film is based on the real-life friendship between Tony Lip (Viggo Mortensen), a blue-collar Italian American, and Dr Don Shirley (Mahershala Ali), the cultured African American concert pianist whom Tony is hired to drive on a tour of the still segregated deep south.

The period, 1962, is romanticised with a handsome palette that could have been lifted from an Edward Hopper painting. Pistachio greens, apricot and caramel, teal blue and lipstick crimsons all saturate the frame. It looks almost inviting – each scene wrapped in a snug embrace of nostalgia. But Farrelly’s sensitive approach to colour is confined to the look of the film. Green Book ’s approach to race is at best naive and at worst jaw-droppingly ill-judged. There are jarring, tone-deaf scenes in which Tony, a man who previously threw away two glasses that had been used by African Americans, is suddenly an expert in black culture who introduces his employer to the joys of jazz and fried chicken.

What redeems the film, to a certain extent, is a superb performance from Ali. There is a patrician quality to his bearing as he sits, cashmere-wrapped and aloof, in the back of the car, wearied by the empty calories of Tony’s chatter. It’s a stark contrast to his public face, an automatic, unfelt smile tacked on to disarm the southern racists who view him as a novelty act rather than a world-class musician. Shirley’s dignified melancholy tips, occasionally, into provocative and self-destructive behaviour – Ali beautifully captures the complexity of the man who juggles whiskey-soured, morning-after regret with a stubborn pride in his true self.

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South Dakota Gov. Noem admits error of describing meeting North Korea’s Kim Jong Un in new book

FILE - South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem speaks during the Conservative Political Action Conference, CPAC 2024, at the National Harbor, Feb. 23, 2024, in Oxon Hill, Md. Noem claims in a new book to have met with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un during her time in Congress, but her office has said the publisher will be addressing “conflated” names in the book as further scrutiny was put on the Republican governor’s life story. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon, File)

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WASHINGTON (AP) — South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem is releasing a new book called “No Going Back,” but on Friday her office said she would actually be going back to correct some errors — including a false claim that she once met with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un .

The Republican governor’s new book was part of an overt effort to be selected as a running mate for Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, but it has already faced bipartisan backlash for a story of how she once shot her hunting dog . Then, after scrutiny of her descriptions of meetings with international leaders, her spokesperson Ian Fury said in a statement that it was an error to include Kim in a list of world leaders who Noem has met — and the publisher would correct any future editions of the book.

Noem’s political prospects were already falling amid widespread disgust for how she recounted killing her 14-month-old wirehaired pointer named Cricket after it had shown aggressive behavior and killed her neighbor’s chickens.

In her soon-to-be-released book, “No Going Back: The Truth on What’s Wrong with Politics and How We Move America Forward,” Noem also describes instances where she has stood up to international leaders — anecdotes that would have bolstered her foreign policy experience — but those were swiftly called into question. She writes about canceling a meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron .

After The Dakota Scout first reported Noem’s descriptions of the meetings, Fury said that the book “has two small errors. This has been communicated to the ghostwriter and editor.”

In addition to the meeting with Kim, Fury said Noem also mistook the dates in which she spoke with former United Nations ambassador Nikki Haley.

“The book has not been released yet, and all future editions will be corrected,” Fury added.

In a section of the book about meeting with international leaders, Noem writes: “Through my tenure on the House Armed Services Committee, I had the chance to travel to many countries to meet with world leaders — some who wanted our help, and some who didn’t.

“I remember when I met with the North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un,” she writes. “I’m sure he underestimated me, having no clue about my experience staring down little tyrants (I’d been a children’s pastor after all).”

The description of such a meeting was quickly challenged and described as implausible by experts on U.S.-North Korea relations. When Noem was a member of the House Armed Services Committee from 2013 to 2015, relations between the two countries were tense and a congressional delegation meeting with Kim would have generated considerable awareness, said Syd Seiler, a former U.S. intelligence officer who spent decades working on the relationship with North Korea.

“Nothing like this happened,” he said, adding that he was working at the White House and State Department during that time period and was not notified of a congressional meeting with Kim.

Noem did join an international congressional trip, known as a codel, to Japan, South Korea and China in 2014.

In the book, Noem also writes that she was “slated to meet with” Macron in November last year while she was in Paris for a conference of European conservative leaders, but canceled when he made comments that she considered “pro-Hamas.”

However, Macron’s office told The Associated Press that no “direct invitation” had been made for Noem to meet the French president, though it did not rule out that she may have been invited to a Paris event that he was also scheduled to attend.

Fury said, “The governor was invited to sit in President Macron’s box for the Armistice Day Parade at Arc de Triomphe. Following his anti-Israel comments, she chose to cancel.”

Meanwhile, Noem is trying to fend off the backlash for writing about shooting her dog as well as a goat.

“Don’t believe the #fakenews media’s twisted spin,” she posted on the social platform X this week. “I had a choice between the safety of my children and an animal who had a history of attacking people & killing livestock.”

Her spokesperson, Fury, also cast scrutiny of the errors in Noem’s book as biased, saying, “The media will, of course, try and make these tiny issues huge.”

Still, members of Congress have poked fun at Noem, with Reps. Jared Moskowitz, a Democrat from Florida; Susan Wild, a Democrat from Pennsylvania; and Nancy Mace, a Republican from South Carolina; launching a Congressional Dog Lovers Caucus this week.

Moskowitz said on X that one of the group’s rules was “you cannot kill a puppy.”

Associated Press writer Sylvie Corbet in Paris contributed.

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‘teenage mutant ninja turtles: black, white & green’ #1 more than lives up to its name.

Doubles as an homage to the Turtles’ early days, and a nod to the radioactive ooze that made them into what they are.

The debut issue of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Black, White & Green not only continues celebrating the Heroes in a Half-Shell’s 40th anniversary, but it takes a whole new approach to a TMNT comic. As the title suggests, the comic is mostly colored in shades of black, white and green – this doubles as both an homage to the Turtles’ early days, and a nod to the radioactive ooze that made them and their adoptive father Splinter into what they are. Other publishers, particularly Marvel and DC, have been experimenting with a similar format and I think it’s one that is a perfect fit for the Turtles.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Black, White & Green #1 consists of four stories in total:

• “Green Screen” is written and illustrated by Declan Shalvey.
• “The Brutal Sword of Leonardo” is written by Dave Baker and Jesse Lonergan, illustrated by Lonergan, and lettered by Dave Baker.
• “The Flame That Fuels You” is written by Gigi Dutriex & Lorenzo Hall, with Dutriex providing illustrations.
• “Identity Theft” is written and illustrated by Paulina Ganucheau.

Each one of these stories revolves around a different turtle. “Screen Time” belongs to Donatello, “The Brutal Sword of Leonardo” is obviously about the Turtles’ leader, “The Flame that Fuels You” centers on Raphael, and “Identity Theft” focuses on Michelangelo. Specifically, each creative team takes the time to actually focus on each Turtle’s personality trait and its ups and downs: Donnie’s skills with machines leads him to be distracted at crucial times, Raph’s anger has him pushing his brothers away, Leo’s dedication to leadership results in tunnel vision, and Mikey’s freewheeling nature can result in some chaotic moments (especially when Donnie’s latest science project comes into play.) It can be hard to write a TMNT story where each Turtle shines, but the beauty of an anthology format lends itself well to their family dynamics.

The artwork shifts depending on the story, once again letting each creator put a stamp on their individual vision of the TMNT’s world. Shalvey emphasizes their turtle aspects, giving them beaks along with scaly skin and weathered shells. Lonergan’s artwork has rougher edges, as well as designs that pay homage to Conan the Barbarian and other fantasy epics; true to the story’s name, Leo wields a double-bladed broadsword in place of his katanas. Dutriex’s has an anime-esque flair, and Ganucheau’s is very reminiscent of the 1987 TMNT animated series.

Something else that caught my eye is the various shades of green being applied throughout the issue. “Screen Time” and “The Brutal Sword of Leonardo” utilize darker hues of green, while “The Flame That Fuels You” is more yellow-ish green and “Identity Theft” is more vibrant. These different shades fit the various tones that each story is trying to accomplish, while also complementing their artists’ unique styles. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Black, White & Green #1 is an appealing start to this anthology series, and future issues look to continue the trends this issue has laid out.

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