Why I can't get excited about 'Green Book'

There's one big Oscar movie this season that I am sort of dreading, perhaps unfairly, and it's the new movie Green Book.

It's getting rave reviews, and is appearing on virtually every Oscar shortlist out there, showing staying power in many major categories.

I like a lot of the comedic work of the director Peter Farrelly (he and his brother made Dumb and Dumber, Kingpin and There's Something About Mary), I love the lead actors Viggo Mortenson and Mahershala Ali -- but the film's trailers have left me with very mixed feelings.

While I am sure it's well made and well acted, it feels like the latest in a long line of well-intentioned movies out of Hollywood that seem to tell their audience "aren't you glad racism is over" or "man, isn't racism bad" through the lens of a white character observing the life of a black character, who in turn enriches them and makes them a better person.

Now, this is entirely unfair of me. I am literally basing all of my skepticism on a single ubiquitous trailer. Of course, it's totally possibly that Green Book is irrepressibly beautiful and charming story of a real-life interracial friendship that portrays a compelling Civil Rights era context. But, I do feel wary of films like this (and I include The Butler, a film made by a black director, Lee Daniels, in this category, too.) which seem to want to leave audiences with a feel-good attitude about race in America.

Great films about the era, like Ava DuVernay's Selma are unflinching about the stakes, the prescience and the real players in the events that took place. They don't require a white knight, white liberal hero to be an audience surrogate -- I'm looking at you The Help -- and so they are not weighed down by forced sentimentality or let anyone off the hook because of a little historical distance from the action.

I fear that Green Book is patting itself on the back for being a kind of reverse Driving Miss Daisy, where the black character appears to have higher status and more agency. But there's a reason that Mortenson is campaigning for Best Actor while Ali is relegating to supporting in this year's Oscar sweepstakes, because this is a movie about Mortenson's character.

Again, I need to see it. I need give it a chance to surprise me. Mortenson and Ali are such warm and lovely performers that I could see it winning me over despite my reservations. But I do want this to be the last film about the black experience from the perspective of a white person.

There have been films like this I have enjoyed in the past. I think Alan Parker's Mississippi Burning is a masterpiece even if it is about white FBI agents investigating the murder of predominately black civil rights workers.

I think the movie works because it is up front about the fact that it is about a fish out of water (Willem Dafoe) being forced to see bigotry up close and learning to embrace the hard-nosed rule breaking tactics of a veteran agent and southern native (played to perfection by Gene Hackman) to seek justice. It is not a feel-good movie per se (even if the bad guys are eventually arrested) and it doesn't turn its white protagonists into flawless superheroes.

That said, 30 years later, that film also stands as an example of when Hollywood was still too scared to tell stories about this country's dark racial past from the perspective of the people who were most affected by it -- African-Americans.

In 2018, we should be doing better, more nuanced things. Predominately black films have had enough commercial success (hell, the biggest movie of the year, and currently this decade is a nearly all-black superhero movie) that you can't argue anymore that audiences won't go to see movie like this without a white lead.

Why couldn't the Mortenson character be the supporting one and the film just be about Ali's pianist character? It's a question I ask myself every time I see ads for this film. And hopefully, I won't be still asking myself that when I eventually drag myself to see it.