The previews for 42, the new movie about baseball player Jackie Robinson, tempted me to wait until the movie came out on video. I feared that the movie would not have much that I did not already know, and the preview made me wonder if the movie was going to be more like a made-for-TV movie. But I love baseball movies and Jackie Robinson’s story is worthy of the big screen, so I headed out to the local movie theater. While the movie may not rise to the level of the best baseball movies, it is still entertaining and worth your time in the theater.
42 covers the story of how Jackie Robinson, played by Chadwick Boseman, came to break the code of Major League Baseball’s ban on black baseball players. The film does not cover all of Robinson’s career, but it covers his rise from the Negro Leagues through his first season in the Majors. Boseman does an excellent job of portraying the hero as a human being, and Nicole Beharie also does a great job of playing Robinson’s wife, Rachel. The most well-known actor in the cast is Harrison Ford, who in an unusual role for him, plays Brooklyn Dodgers owner Branch Rickey.
Some have complained that writer-director Brian Helgeland focuses too much on the white men like Rickey. With no standing to defend the movie’s perspective, I do understand the complaint and would like to see a film that focused almost entirely on Robinson’s view. But 42 is trying to do something else by showing the historical context of Robinson’s great achievement. I also appreciated that Helgeland did not settle for showing stereotypes and that he featured some good people in the South as well as racists in New York.
One minor weakness in the film is that it only shows Robinson’s first season, and it left me wanting more. So 42 suffers from some of the problems with biopics that can only cover so much time.
42 also suffers a little from trying to fit into the baseball movie genre. Baseball films often end with an important baseball game win (or loss), and 42, like the recent Moneyball (2011), tries to fit in that genre but comes a little short because of real life. During Robinson’s first season in the Majors in 1947, his team did win the pennant and the movie portrays the climactic scene of Robinson hitting the home run to clinch it. But since the Dodgers won the division over the Cardinals by five games that season, it was somewhat lacking in drama. The movie does not follow Robinson into the World Series, apparently because the Yankees beat Robinson’s team four games to three. So reality took away a little of the traditional baseball climax, but, of course, the drama of 42 is really on Jackie Robinson succeeding when so much was against him, and the movie does a good job of telling the real story.
The movie does do an excellent job of showing some of the difficulties that Jackie Robinson encountered from opposing players, opposing managers, and his own teammates. And you get to see the true strength of a man who had the courage to turn the other cheek for a higher cause (although not depicted in the film, by 1949 when other black players were established in Major League Baseball, Robinson could finally fight back).
Conclusion: Overall, 42 is an engaging story about some things you knew about and probably some things you did not. It tells the story of a real hero and should be required viewing for every child in America. For a bonus video, here is Jackie Robinson appearing on What’s My Line? after he retired from baseball, and you can see at the end how he still speaks fondly of Branch Rickey.
Other Reviews Because Why Should You Trust Me?: Rotten Tomatoes gives 42 a critics rating of 77% and an audience rating of 88%, which makes sense because fans may appreciate the true-life story and care less if the movie is too predictable. Jeffrey M. Anderson at Combustible Celluloid says that 42 is “a wonderful, huge, glossy, mythical portrait of America’s growing pains.” By contrast, Rick Kisonak at Seven Days concludes that Jackie Robinson “deserves a movie that strives to be at least half as great as he was, a movie better than a cookie-cutter Hollywood biopic like this one.”
Bonus History Lesson: At the end of 42, Helgeland shows scenes of modern baseball players, starting with Yankee Derek Jeter for some reason, wearing Jackie Robinson’s number 42 on the annual Jackie Robinson Day. I wish, though, that Helgeland had shown a scene of the baseball player who actually inspired the idea of having players wear Jackie Robinson’s number on that day, Ken Griffey, Jr.
How does “42” rank among the great baseball movies? Leave your two cents in the comments.
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