First up is "Green Book," which you've probably heard described as a twist on "Driving Miss Daisy" because it features a black pianist, Don "Doc" Shirley (Mahershala Ali), being chauffeured on a concert tour through the Deep South by a white driver, Tony Vallelonga (Viggo Mortensen), in the 1960s. I suspect another reason the comparison keeps coming up is because "Green Book" feels like a film made in the late 1980s. The language is more profane, and there's a same-sex encounter that probably wouldn't have passed muster thirty years ago, but otherwise the way the characters are treated and the way the themes are handled feels positively old fashioned.
This isn't to say that "Green Book" is a bad film. The performances by Mortensen and Ali are great. Ali, in particular, is playing a completely different kind of character than I've ever seen him play before, and he's instantly memorable in the role. Watching the two of them doing "Odd Couple" schtick on the road together is very entertaining, and they do a good job of distracting the viewer from all the ancient tropes of American race relations films that get trotted out here for the millionth time. Of course Tony learns to shed his casual racism upon getting to know Doc and his struggles. Of course the erudite Doc learns to better appreciate the common man through his interactions with Tony.
It's not that this kind of story doesn't still work, but the film's elevation by Hollywood strikes a very odd note in a year that also gave us "Blindspotting," "Sorry to Bother You," and "This is America." As fun as the relationship between Doc and Tony is, it also comes off as highly manufactured and overly simplified. One of the credited screenwriters is the son of the real Tony Vallelonga, which probably explains why the script feels scrubbed of any real rough edges. It's also a shame that the first substantial onscreen portrayal of Don Shirley, a fascinating figure in musical history, should be through this lens. Do you think they could get Mahershala Ali back for a proper biopic?
Now on to "Vice," the movie about the infamous Dick Cheney's rise to power. The whole film is built around two major conceits. The first is Christian Bale's transformation into Cheney, via a lot of good makeup work and an impressive performance. To a lesser extent, Sam Rockwell's George W. Bush and Steve Carrell's Donald Rumsfeld also deserve their kudos. The second is writer/director Adam McKay's approach to the material, which is similar to how he tackled the 2008 financial crisis in "The Big Short." There's fourth-wall breaking everywhere, meta and cutaways used for satirical effect, and a very biting, sardonic tone with a lot of dark humor. It's not nearly as successful this time around.
I think my viewing of the film was colored by my own interest in politics. I'm relatively well informed about recent history and a lot of the bad behavior being spotlighted by McKay wasn't new to me. I also didn't need much convincing that Dick Cheney and his associates did a lot of damage in his time as the Vice President. So as far as I was concerned, "Vice" was preaching to the choir. And maybe that's why I spent so much of the film so utterly bored. Sure, Bale makes an uncanny Cheney, but Cheney isn't a particularly cinematic figure, and in the later parts of the film often speaks in a low grumble. McKay tries to make up for it by relaying his lessons in recent history with a lot of flash and dazzle, but it's not very effective.
There's one sequence toward the end of the film that sticks out as a good example of the movie's problems. At this point George W. Bush has just been elected, and Cheney is being briefed on all of his various allies in different departments and organizations around Washington. We're rapidly bombarded by about a dozen names and all the details of their positions, accompanied by some animation that shows us each person rendered like a game piece being set up on a board. And after this scene is finished, absolutely none of this information ever comes up again. Yes, the point was made that Cheney had a lot of crooked friends in high places to help him, but was it worth having to sit through all this tedious exposition to do it? That never feels like it pays off anything?
I'm glad we've got a filmmaker willing to call out Dick Cheney like this, but it feels like the politics got in the way of the filmmaking here, and that's an awful shame.
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