The tone of some of these guides has a breeziness comparable with Lonely Planet books. The Green Book existed to help travellers have as pleasant, or at least as bearable, a time as possible. The upbeat nature of the prose reflects this: one headline reads ‘The Green Book is the Guide to Every Traveller’s Dream’. The series also carried advertisements, including one for Studebaker cars, anticipating a level of affluence on the part of readers. A handbook infused with fear or outrage this is not.

The series, understandably perhaps, did not dwell on its raison d’être amid the horrors of the Jim Crow era and the commonplace racism and violence in the South. Similarly, Peter Farrelly’s film Green Book, based on a true story and set in 1962, chooses not to confront race relations or to ask nuanced questions about this ever-relevant period in US history. Instead, it tells a fast-moving and sometimes affecting tale of a friendship that blossoms between a burly, street-smart Italian-American bouncer and a black concert pianist, despite the former’s initial prejudices. Although the film is entertaining and accessible, it leaves the viewer with an uneasy sense of the film’s naïveté and superficiality.

 Mahershala Ali as Don Shirley in Green Book (photograph by Universal Pictures)

Dr Don Shirley (Mahershala Ali), a renowned virtuoso pianist who lives in a lavish apartment above Carnegie Hall in New York, is to embark on a tour of the South performing his repertoire of jazz-influenced popular standards. Having heard good things about an uncompromising doorman at the Copacabana nightclub, he approaches Tony 'Lip' Vallelonga (Viggo Mortensen, who clearly piled on the kilos to play a man of large appetites) and asks him to be his driver and bodyguard during this risky two-month tour. After some toing and froing, an agreement is reached and the majority of the film is spent on the road with this ostensibly odd couple. Tony, a responsible family man, albeit with a short temper and a thuggish demeanour, is depicted as a run-of-the-mill racist early in the film; he behaves appallingly when black workers visit his home. Don, on the other hand, is a multilingual intellectual with three degrees, articulate, well read, highly cultured.

This contrast in character presents certain open goals for comedy: Farrelly and the screenwriters (one of whom is Vallelonga’s son Nick) take advantage of them in predictable ways. Indeed, Green Book veers closely at times to being a comic film. Given the subject matter, this may not have been the intention of Farrelly (who, with his brother Bobby, gave us ‘blockbuster’ comedies Dumb and Dumber [1994] and There’s Something About Mary [1998]).

On occasion, the humour works very well, thanks largely to a natural rapport between these two fine actors and, in particular, to Ali’s gift for comic timing. One successful example comes when Tony coaxes Don into trying fried chicken on the assumption that all black people enjoy this dish. This scene – an expertly crafted comedic set-piece that plays on various dimensions of each character’s personality and the cultural mores of the day – is infused with the warmth of their growing bond.

Viggo Mortensen and Mahershala Ali in Green Book (photograph by Universal Pictures)

However, Green Book often targets cheap laughs and becomes shallow as a result. Several cringe-worthy scenes see Don, a sophisticated wordsmith, dictate romantic letters for Tony to send home to his wife. In others, Don tries to improve Tony’s spoken diction and pronunciation by instructing him in a farcical manner comparable to Henry Higgins and Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady. In a different film these light touches may be appropriate, but in Green Book such a dedication to largely meaningless banter seems wrong-headed, given that the film ignores some crucial questions.

Chief among these is exactly why Don is making this concert tour through a region where he is likely to face abuse, humiliation, and violence. It is cursorily hinted at that he chose to do so out of a desire to confront racism in these cities. His drummer tells Tony that ‘genius is not enough, it takes courage to change people’s hearts’, a vague platitude that is not explored here. We never hear from Don himself regarding his motivations for the trip; this leaves a yawning gap in the narrative.

More examination of Don’s relationship with music would also have been welcome – although, in one strong (but brief) scene, he does explain to Tony that his heart lies with classical music despite the less refined, crowd-pleasing material he must perform each night. Furthermore, although the film is flawed, it is hard not to be drawn into its feel-good mood during a sequence where, having walked out on a concert venue in Birmingham, Alabama, that refused to allow Don to eat in its restaurant, the pair visits a bar where Don spectacularly performs Chopin on a dilapidated upright for an awed black audience (Kris Bowers, who composed the score, does most of the playing).

That scene where Don is shunned by the restaurant is one of a number that do address the fear and absurdity that permeated the Southern cities at the time. Elsewhere, a tailor refuses to allow Don to try on a suit, while, at one concert set in a mansion, he is asked to use a derelict outhouse instead of the indoor bathroom. Yet these scenes, though powerful in themselves, come and go without either lead character offering compelling insight or demonstrating their own development in the wake of these experiences.

Though touted as a possible Oscar contender, Green Book has been beset by problems in recent months. Not only has Farrelly had to apologise for past crude behaviour, and Nick Vallelonga for anti-Muslim tweets, but the surviving family of Don Shirley have criticised the film’s factual accuracy, particularly the closeness of the friendship between the two men. These developments neither negate the film’s strengths nor exacerbate its weaknesses. But the latter issue – artistic licence in order to tell a streamlined, heart-warming story – reflects the fact that any work of art dealing with racial tensions and the social context that gave rise to them is tangled up in complexity, and that any attempt to simplify or crystallise is bound to fall short in some way. Despite being well paced and at times nicely written, Green Book is a facile and slightly self-satisfied encapsulation of that which cannot be encapsulated.

Green Book (Entertainment One) 130 minutes, directed by Peter Farrelly. In cinemas 24 January 2019.

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