The film tells the story of two people of different races and social classes, who for one reason or another, are united in one situation. They have opposing personalities. We know that at one point they will fight, then another time, get along again. At another point, they inevitably have to solve the problem together. And before they realize it, it turns out they are already enlightened; found that they were not so different from each other. You’re both human.
Yes, this sounds like a plot of all films about friendship between two people who are theoretically incompatible. When you know that the second bonding occurs via a trip on a Cadillac, where one is a driver and the other is an employer, I understand that you are immediately reminded of Driving Miss Daisy. The twist, the one who became the driver this time was white, while the employer was black. And more surprisingly, the story is based on a true story. Nowadays, it’s just normal, but in the 60s, this was a crazy phenomenon.
The driver is Tony Vallelonga, played by Viggo Mortensen as an Italian-American cliche that looks like it was taken directly from the film extras The Godfather or Goodfellas. He spoke in accent with a typical Italian mafia. He likes to talk big, until he gets the nickname “Tony Lip”. He loves ngudud. And like most Italian descent families, he also loved his wife (Linda Cardellini) and his children. He is temperament and prefers to solve problems with boxing. His job is as a bouncer at a nightclub.
Because the club was renovated, Tony was forced to idle for a while. But electricity and food accounts for children have never been shut down. Luckily, Tony got an offer to be a driver for a doctor. The doctor in question is not a real doctor, but a prominent pianist named Dr. Don Shirley (Mahershala Ali). The problem is, Don is a black man, and Tony is not very comfortable with that — at the beginning of the film, Tony even throws away the glass used by blackskin mechanics. But yeah what can be done, for the sake of the child and wife.