'Green Book': The Feel-Good Movie of the Year

The film was written by Tony's son Nick with Brian Currie and the director, Peter Farrelly, 61 (known for There’s Something About Mary and Dumb and Dumber, but now an A-list drama director, too).

Viggo Mortensen drives Mahershala Ali through the Deep South in “Green Book.”

Patti Perret/Universal

Expect Oscar nominations for the two stars: Ali captures Donald’s piano genius and haughty defensiveness, and  Mortensen  nails Tony’s good nature and amusing cluelessness. Temporarily unemployed and needing the driver job, he tells Donald how woke he is: “My wife and I had a couple coloreds over for drinks!”

What Tony doesn’t say (and we just saw) is that they were black maintenance men fixing his sink — he reluctantly served them water, then dumped the glasses they drank from in the trash.

The road trip on which Tony’s racial consciousness and Donald’s class consciousness get raised is reminiscent of Driving Miss Daisy (and also other Oscar best picture nominees: The Help, Hidden Figures, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner and The Blind Side), only less sentimental, even though it still shamelessly plucks arpeggios on your heartstrings. Tony, who likes to drive while smoking and chomping an entire pizza folded over, is scandalized to hear snooty Donald confess that he’s never heard Aretha Franklin or Chubby Checker: “I’m blacker than you are!” he says. Ridiculous, yet it  stings,  since Donald’s identity is doubly troubled — a black playing for white audiences, a wealthy man without many black neighbors in his posh penthouse atop Carnegie Hall, gay but acting straight for dear life.

Mortensen gets most of the funniest lines, but Ali has the most moving cri de coeur speech. For both of these marvelous characters, the South is like a foreign country, and so is the new two-man world of tolerance that they’re inadvertently creating together.

The two guys’ odyssey is knit together with a subplot about hyperliterate Donald dictating Tony’s all-of-a-sudden incredibly romantic letters to his wife (the wonderful Linda Cardellini, 43, from ER) back home in the Bronx. It’s all so calculated to soothe your fears and make you feel good about America (and yourself!), you can’t stop from leaping to your feet to applaud.