Reconciliation: one personal encounter at a time

On saturday night my wife and I went to see The Green Book. Today I heard that it got Academy Award for best film!
 I thought it was excellent and would highly recommend it. It is the heart-warming story of a very unlikely friendship, that between a coarse Italian American nightclub bouncer and a refined African-American pianist. As they travel through the Deep South of the USA in the 1960s they encounter blatant racism, harassment, and discrimination. This provides the backdrop for them to bond, learn from each other, change and adapt.

The movie has many lessons about human nature and aspirations. We all yearn for close personal relationships, for identity, for justice, and for righteousness. Yet we are capable of incredible cruelty and violence, particularly when we encounter those different to us, and/or those who threaten our power and lifestyle. We ourselves are also sometimes the obstacle to our aspirations.


One of the criticisms/controversies about the movie is the claim that it is in the white saviour genre trope, where a white person saves a black person/community. There are certainly too many movies in this genre, such as one I recently saw. However, I would not characterise Green Book that way. In contrast, the two characters have a mutually beneficial relationship.

Some of this is discussed in an article in Variety, Is Green Book woke enough? by Owen Gleiberman.

Those who are woke claim, through their very wokeness, to have allegiance to one thing: the transcendent morality of their cause. Yet woke culture, as practiced in America in 2018, also carries an undercurrent of competition. As in: How woke are you? Not as woke as me! I’ll see you one courageous, self-lacerating woke insight and raise you two! In this atmosphere of a never-ending contest of righteous one-upmanship fought out on Twitter, the middlebrow Hollywood liberal attitudes on display in “Green Book” can look like something from a vanished world of movies that pretend to liberate but really just pander. “Green Book” has been condemned, in certain circles, as if it were a racially stodgy and unenlightened embarrassment — the “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” of 2018 awards bait. It has been called a white-savior movie — though, in fact, it is not. (The two characters save one another, which is a very different thing.) 

Again we see the yearning for justice and righteousness.