42: The Jackie Robinson Story Written and directed by Brian Helgeland (review)

Early in his review of 42, chief New York Times film critic A.O. Scott calls this movie “Blunt, simple and sentimental.” So is the Bible. Wanna make some-thin’ o’ dat? This is an exciting, tension-building, satisfying, and ultimately uplifting movie. I would defy anyone who was “there” in the late 1940s and the early 1950s, when Brooklyn’s Dodgers became the “Jackie Robinson Dodgers” and number 42 became the pride and hero of virtually every Brooklynite, not to enjoy, be deeply moved, and be inspired by this carefully researched and documented account of the shattering of Major League Baseball’s color barrier. In a prerelease interview, writer and director Brian Hegleland explained that in writing the script, he “was trying to make sure every moment was documented.” It shows, seamlessly.

Could someone complain that the film (at two hours and eight minutes) goes on a bit too long, the “point” having been gotten sooner than that? Yes, that case could be argued. Could someone carp that in key scenes the music used to underscore virtue’s triumph is too obvious, too loud, too unnecessarily insistent? Yes, not an outlandish observation. Might it be said that newcomer Chadwick Boseman—although, by parts, appropriately cool and appropriately hot, almost always dignified—as Jackie, plays it just a tad too taciturn and buttoned up, for those of us who remember the opinionated, palpably passionate, highly articulate, sometimes profane, feisty, mature Robinson? Perhaps, although the film doesn’t go beyond Robinson’s 1947 rookie season. In any event, these cinematic peccadillos are not nearly enough to erode the overall scintillating, exhilarating effect of this project.

A rather long while ago, someone commented that “The Jackie Robinson story is one that cannot be told too many times.” It is an unabashed, unembarrassed, unambiguous morality tale in which the good guys win the big ones. It is inextricably embedded in twentieth-century US history, and is as mythologically American as Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, fdr’s depression assuaging New Deal, and Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” speech. King himself once said, “No Jackie Robinson no Martin Luther King.” And he observed that “Jackie Robinson was a freedom rider before there were freedom riders.”

All the iconic moments are here.

• • Rickey, in their first encounter, calls Robinson a “nigger son of a bitch” to test his prospective player’s powers of restraint. Robinson asking, “Mr. Rickey, do you want a ballplayer who’s afraid to fight back?” and Rickey retorting, “No, I want a ballplayer who’s not afraid to not fight back.”

• • Manager Leo Durocher (a salty portrayal by Christopher Meloni) reacts to a spring-training petition by some of the Dodgers opposed to playing with Robinson by calling a middle-of-the-night team meeting and screaming at his players: “I don’t care if he’s yellow or has stripes like a zebra. If he can play, and from everything I’ve seen he can, he plays. And boys, he’s only the first. They’re coming and they want to play. And if you don’t pay attention to your jobs they’ll take them.”

• • Ralph Branca (Hamish Linklater), who won twenty-one games in Brooklyn’s 1947 pennant season, urges Robinson to shower with the rest of “his team.” (According to Peter Golenbock’s Bums, it was actually another player of Italian extraction, Al Gionfriddo, maker of that immortal catch off a Joe Dimaggio blast in Game Six of the 1947 World Series).

• • Captain Harold Pee Wee Reese (Lucas Black) during a game in Cincinnati, near his hometown of Louisville, comes across the infield to Robinson as the taunts and epithets crest, and conspicuously puts his arm around number 42 and stays there chatting with Robinson. The fans, like it or not, got the point.

One of the most winning aspects of the film is Harrison Ford’s pitch-perfect performance as Dodgers general manager Branch Rickey, who resolved to introduce an African American...