The Hate U Give (★★★★★) starts out as a culture-clash story. Starr Carter (Amandla Stenberg) lives in a poor, mostly black neighbourhood and attends a private high school with wealthy, mostly white kids. Narrated by Starr, she tells how she has two different versions of herself to deal with her twin lives. She explains that the local public high school is where you get jumped, high or pregnant, but she knows what to do to blend in. The story becomes more complicated when Starr sees her friend Khalil (Algee Smith) killed by police in a routine traffic stop. At first Starr stands aside as her friends protest the injustice, but she has been taught her rights from an early age.
This emotionally raw film is directed by George Tillman Jr and based on Angie Thomas’s 2017 young adult novel THUG LIFE. The title, which is also the name of the late Tupac Shakur’s group, is an acronym for “The Hate U Give Little Infants Fucks Everybody”. The rich social drama is not without humour. Driven by great performances from all the cast, it gives some insight into the perpetuating cycle of violence of race relations in the United States.
Green Book (★★★★½) is also about race relations in the United States, and it is also driven by outstanding actors. Viggo Mortensen is Italian American bouncer from the Bronx Tony ‘Lip’ Vallelonga who is hired to drive virtuoso pianist Dr Don Shirley (Mahershala Ali) on an eight-week concert tour to southern states. It is 1962 and as Dr Shirley is African-American, they must follow a guide book written by Victor Hugo Greene, The Negro Motorist Green Book, that lists restaurants and accommodation that will accept black people. Inspired by a true story, director Peter Farrelly takes the audience back to the times of American Apartheid.
This film features heavily in the current season awards. Street smart Tony and the highly educated but very naive Dr Shirley are certainly an odd couple as they bounce off each other, creating an enormous amount of humour. But the script written is by the actual Tony’s son Nick Vallelonga and the feel-good story is more one of redemption for Tony. While the atrocious treatment of blacks is portrayed, there isn’t much exploration of Dr Shirley who is not accepted by either the black or the white cultures, and who also happens to be gay.
On The Basis of Sex (★★★★½) Having seen the documentary RBG about the extraordinary US Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, I didn’t think this film was going to be very interesting … but I was mistaken. Directed by Mimi Leder (Pay It Forward), the film takes us back to the beginning when Ginsberg was started at the Harvard Law School. Battling the entrenched privileged sexism dictated by ‘biological imperatives’, the young Ginsberg (Felicity Jones) excels, only to find that she can’t get a job. It is her supportive tax lawyer husband Marty (Armie Hammer) who works with her on the ground-breaking gender discriminating case representing a man denied a tax deduction for his sick mother’s caregiver because he’s unmarried – under the law only women or married/widowed men qualify.
They win, and this is the beginning of Ginsberg’s career to overturn all the laws in the US constitution that discriminate on the basis of sex. With Ginsberg’s nephew Daniel Stiepleman writing the script and 85-year-old Ginsberg appearing at the end of the film, the film pushes all the right buttons to remind us of the attitudes of an era and the remarkable woman who sought to change them, one law at time.
Lezly Herbert
