The Green Book and other Fables

The Green Book is a winner, and it's hard to imagine anyone not enjoying it. (Yet some people haven't, and perhaps there are good reasons why.)  It's well crafted, like the best comedies from Hollywood's golden age, and to describe it as cliché-ridden is like saying the Comedia del Arte is full of stock characters or that the sonata form repeats a lot. What else is new? The question is, what is being made of those patterns, those materials?

The basic formula is easy to describe: Tony, a brusque Italian-American bouncer (Viggo Mortenson) from the Bronx, temporarily unemployed, takes a job driving Doc (Mahershala Ali), a talented and effete black pianist who lives in an apartment in Carnegie Hall, on a concert tour through the South. 

Tony lives in a world of ethnic and cultural stereotypes, like most people of that era, but he's actually a fairly nice guy. He also has a reputation for being able to "handle" trouble, which is why he got the job. Doc knows there's going to be trouble during the tour. According to his band mates, that's one of the reasons he decided to undertake it.

The film largely consists of a series of conversations between this "odd couple" punctuated by incidents in which they encounter difficulties—some the result of deeply engrained attitudes of the Deep South, others largely self-generated.

The dialog is often funny, but it's also touching in many places. Doc tries to get Tony to improve his diction and helps him write love letters home to his wife; Frank introduces Doc to Little Richard and tries to get him to eat a piece of fried chicken. At one point he exclaims, "Doc, I'm more black than you!" No, Doc corrects him stiffly, you're not.

The film doesn't offer any sweeping vision or formula for the future of race relations. Then again, as far as I can recall, neither did Trading Places, Silver Streak, or Rush Hour II. But in describing it as a comedy, I don't mean to suggest it doesn't explore some very ugly corners of the American scene. The genius in the film lies in the success with which the main characters, who would be very unlikely to associate under normal circumstances, develop a grudging fondness for each other, working their way through the clichés to make contact with deeper veins of personal character.  

Shoplifters

We don't often get a good look at the underbelly of Japanese life, where men and women form unusual living arrangements and scam the government in order to get by. In Shoplifters we meet up with a disparate group of individuals living in a two-room apartment. Granny is a cagey old coot, though it's not clear who's grandma she is. The "man of the house," Osamu, has a job as a day-laborer but spends quite a bit of time shoplifting with a boy named Shota who lives with the family. The "mother," Nobuyo, works at an industrial laundry, and a younger woman named Aki also occupies some space.

Though their situation may be dire, especially after Osamu injures his foot at a construction site, the tone of the film tends to be light. Osama is a puckish character, they've got sources of revenue, food on the table, and a roof over their heads. Things get more complicated when Osamu and Shota come upon a little girl named Juri—not for the first time—who's being neglected and perhaps physically abused by her parents, and decide to bring her home. It's one more mouth to feed, but when it comes down to it, they find that they can't send her back to a life more miserable than their own. "It's not kidnapping if you don't ask for ransom. Right? And we're not holding her against her will."

Much of the film consists of a series of random episodes during which we develop a better picture of who's related to whom, and how. But that's not the important point. The big question is, how are these kids (both Juri and Shota) going to handle such issues as parental neglect and crime, once the public authorities get their hands on them. All of the characters linger in memory long after the movie is over, but the underlying themes are pretty obvious: giving birth to a child doesn't automatically make you a mother, and social workers often don't have a clue. It's a touching tale worthy of Yasijurō Ozu thematically, if not stylistically, which may explain why Shoplifters won the Palme d'Or at Cannes last year.

Happy as Lazzaro 

Several extended families of farm workers keep a tobacco farm going in a poverty-stricken region of southern Italy. Their landlords have somehow neglected to let them know that share-cropping has been illegal for a half-century. It's a tough life, the kids don't go to school, but it's all they've known.  

A bright spot is provided by  Lazzaro, a seemingly naive lad who enjoys helping out, doing more than his share of the work, brightening the mood. The other workers depend on him, and take advantage of him.

When the landowners arrive for a visit and to settle accounts, their son Tancredi takes a liking to Lazzaro, and the two develop a peculiar quasi-friendship. In a sequence of events too complicated to describe, the authorities are called to the scene and put an end to the peasants' virtual enslavement.

But that's only half the story. I'm not going to describe how these people's lives play themselves out in the city, but it reminded me more than once of John Berger's trilogy, Into Their Labors. And that's quite a compliment.

Zama

Set at a remote coastal trading outpost in eighteenth-century Argentina, Zama is rich in historical detail and local color, but also dolorous, claustrophobic, and slightly deranged. The narrative, such as it is, hangs by a thread on Corregidor Don Diego de Zama's eagerness for orders from Spain to arrive, transferring him to a new post. He's the local justice, but his rulings are few and far between. Zama has lingering respect, but not much authority.

Meanwhile, he longs for news from his wife and children and is disturbed by his growing interest in the native women. He seems to have few friends or even allies in the village—which  we never actually see with any degree of perspective. The first half of the film is a growing litany of frustrations, misunderstandings, and disappointments, all of which highlight the man's isolation and diminishing sense of self worth.

Why would we want to follow along on this trail of tears? Well, why read Becket? Or Bouvard et Pécuchet? Aren't you interested in the underside of colonial life? After all, this could be Grand Portage, or Fort Bent. The natives are here and there, servants, you see them looking at you, subservient ... for now.

The trouble is, in a hierarchical society, when everything trickles down from the top, it's hard to make a break and do things on your own initiative. Zama finally decides to sign up for a hare-brained expedition into the back country in search of a notorious bandit. Finally we get to see a bit of the countryside. We get to meet the natives. But in the end, this turns out not to have been a good idea.

“I wish it wasn’t so rough for the audience, but there are some ways that can be beneficial,” director Lucretia Martel says. “Anything that causes you to move out of predictability is not comfortable. It’s meant to be disturbing.”