42

 

In bringing the story of Jackie Robinson to the big screen, writer-director Brian Helgeland treats his central figure as a stoic, but distant icon.  42 puts much of its focus on Robinson suffering the various slings and arrows of racism as he becomes the first black man to play professional baseball for the 1947 Brooklyn Dodgers.  In fact, it puts so much focus on this aspect, it almost completely forgets about Robinson's accomplishments on the field that season, as well.

Watching the movie, I felt like huge chunks of the story had been ripped out.  Jackie Robinsin is played very well by Chadwick Boseman, but to what end?  We learn so little about him, he remains an enigma for almost the entire film.  He's recruited early in the film by Brooklyn Dodges General Manger Branch Rickey, who as portrayed by Harrison Ford, comes across as a cartoonish cigar-chomping old coot who would be right at home if Hollywood ever does a remake of Grumpy Old Men.  We don't even fully learn Branch's reasons for recruiting Jackie until late in the film.  This is a movie that is made up out of historical settings, practice games, and brief snippets of actual games that give us absolutely no sense of the team, or even Robinson's skill as a player.  When one of his teammates tells Jackie in the locker room that he is carrying the team, I found myself asking why, since we see so little of Jackie actually playing.  We also learn that the Dodgers were having an undefeated season up to that point.  Shame we never get to see them actually win a game until the very last scene.

Instead, the film focuses on the racial issue that followed Robinson being drafted into the Dodgers.  This does bring about some effective moments, such as when Jackie is forced to hold in his feelings while listening to the insults and taunts from Phillis coach Ben Chatman (Alan Tudyk).  The movie makes much of the point that Robinson was the beginning of a turning point in professional baseball, but once again, it does not dig deep enough.  We don't get a sense of peoples' minds being changed.  That's because the movie is constantly soft with the facts.  It constantly shows Robinson taking the verbal abuse, but seldom shows the effect it had on him.  He simply stands there, defiant, and doesn't go any deeper then that.  True, there is one scene where he breaks down after having to put up with Chatman's abuse while on the field, but outside of that, we never get a real sense of the struggle that Jackie went through in his first year.

42 continuously whitewashes over the details, turning people who should be important figures in the film into well-meaning, but uninteresting caricatures.  Jackie's wife, Rachel (Nicole Beharie), was obviously a key player in keeping her husband strong during the times the world felt like it was against him, but you wouldn't know it here.  Despite a fine performance from Beharie, she's not given a character to play.  Rachel's main role in the story is to sit in the bleachers, clapping for her husband, or holding their baby as she watches her husband play.  She gets to say a couple inspiring speeches that help keep her husband going, but that's about it.  We learn nothing about their relationship, or what they really meant to each other.  I'm sure she was just as supportive as she comes across in this movie, but surely she must have worried about her husband, or faced some of the same backlash he did.  None of this comes through in the movie.

We keep on seeing various moments from Jackie's life and career, but none of them resonate, because Helgeland's screenplay simply checks off these moments with little to no emotional impact.  We know they are important, but we're seldom given any context.  A good example is when the team's manager is caught in a sex scandal, and has to be let go.  This would seem significant, but in this movie, it's barely touched upon, we don't really learn the impact it had on the players, and it's resolved with no consequence just a couple scenes later.  What did the players think about the old manager being let go?  What did they think of the new guy?  Heck, what did Jackie think?  This movie doesn't care.  It tells its story in such a breezy manner that we seldom learn what any of these people think about any of the events going on around them.  These are characters who know they're in a docu-drama.  They know that we can just go home and look up information on these people at home on line and in books.  They don't have to tell us anything except the bare facts.  We're expected to fill in the blanks for ourselves.  I can live with that normally, but this movie leaves so many aspects of these people blank that they don't feel like people to start with. 

 

42 is a well-made movie, and it's generally well-acted, outside of Ford's somewhat over-the-top performance.  The problem lies strictly on the script level.  It's so busy hammering home its message of racial equality that it pretty much brushes aside every other aspect of Jackie Robinson's life.  Even the sequence at the end that tells us what happened to these people after the movie leaves off doesn't really fill us in all that much.  This is an overall disappointing film that has a few fleeting moments of inspiration that is brought down by some very clunky storytelling.

See the movie times in your area or buy the DVD at Amazon.com!

0 comments