The most savage things critics have said about 2019 Best Picture winner 'Green Book'
Newly-named Best Picture winner Green Book may have won over the Academy, but it sure didn't win over all critics.
Even as Green Book's Oscars campaign picked up steam, it's earned some reviews ranging from unfavorable to flat-out brutal, with much of the criticism stemming from accusations that the film was tone-deaf to its subject matter.
Here's a rundown of what some critics had to say -- and in some cases, are still saying -- about the highly contentious Green Book.
It hides in warm, fuzzy feelings that haven’t been earned and lessons that haven’t been learned. I’d rather a movie made me feel bad for a good cause than feel good for a bad cause.
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One could argue that being based on real people, the film is limited by history in the liberties it can take with the story. But given that the film is co-written by Lip’s son Nick Vallelonga, it becomes clearer why the film skews in the direction of dismissing Lip’s racism for the feel-good narrative of a deeply-bonded interracial friendship. In trying to both tout and preserve his father’s legacy, Vallelonga reveals the intrinsic problem with “race movies” like these: they are always, always, always about letting white people off the hook for their individual roles in perpetuating institutional harms.
Lawrence Ware, The New York Times:
I saw “Green Book” in a crowd of older white people — the precise audience this film had in mind. Once it was over, they clapped and commented to one another about how good the movie had been. “That was the best film I’ve seen in years!” one woman said as she walked out with a smile on her face. I could understand why.
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Finally, a film for anyone who has watched Beverly Hills Cop and thought: “Hmm. It’s good, but it would be funnier if they set it in the Deep South in 1962 and they made Eddie Murphy into a snooty concert pianist and Judge Reinhold into an Italian-American bouncer!”
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The awards circuit run for the film has revealed that director Peter Farrelly has, in essence, fully bought into the movie’s central notion, which is that racism can be solved if we just get to know each other better. Green Book isn’t a movie about what it’s about. It’s a movie that suggests it’s about weighty topics, but it skirts away from those topics most of the time. It’s entertaining enough, but it’s also deeply weird and evasive. I genuinely can’t believe it’s so beloved in some circles, even when accounting for how much white people (guilty as charged!) enjoy entertainment that absolves them of responsibility.
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Alistair Harkness, The Scotsman:
If the recent Oscar successes of 12 Years a Slave and Moonlight suggested the Academy Awards were becoming more racially progressive, culturally sensitive and artistically minded, the sudden elevation of Green Book to one of this year’s front-runners feels like a step backwards. Specifically, it feels like a step back in time to 1990, when Driving Miss Daisy won the Oscar for Best Picture.
“Green Book” is the worst best picture Oscar winner since “Crash,” and I don’t make the comparison lightly. Like that 2005 movie, Peter Farrelly’s interracial buddy dramedy is insultingly glib and hucksterish, a self-satisfied crock masquerading as an olive branch. It reduces the long, barbaric and ongoing history of American racism to a problem, a formula, a dramatic equation that can be balanced and solved. “Green Book” is an embarrassment; the film industry’s unquestioning embrace of it is another.
