42 (2013)

I went into the biopic 42 wanting to know what it was really like for Jackie Robinson to be the first African American man to play professional baseball. When I left the theater, I still wanted to know. That is a problem, but that does not mean that 42 doesn’t serve its sappy, uplifting purpose. On the contrary, it is a perfectly capable piece of crowd-pleasing Hollywood entertainment. It takes Robinson’s story, puts it into the generic, uplifting biopic machine, and the result is a film that is manipulative and safe, but also moving in all the right ways. The writing and filmmaking is perfectly adequate, but the real reason for the film’s modest artistic success is an awesome starring performance from Chadwick Boseman, a television actor thrown into the role of Robinson without a whole lot of film experience. He is absolutely fantastic, and at times he keeps the movie afloat all by himself. We’re always rooting for him, even if the material isn't always up to snuff.

The plot kicks into motion right away, as Brooklyn Dodgers executive Branch Rickey (a strong Harrison Ford) announces that he’d like to bring an African American player into Major League Baseball. It’s not the most elegant of starts. Eventually he chooses a young lad named Jack Robinson (the aforementioned Boseman), who he believes to be just the right mix of talent and attitude. As Rickey puts it, he wants a player that isn’t soft, but also a player who will turn the other cheek to the abuse he will inevitably face. And face it he does. During his time with the minor league Montreal Royals and then the Dodgers themselves, Robinson takes abuse from his own team, MLB officials, the American south, and worst of all the Philadelphia Phillies. One of the film’s most brutal scenes involves Phillies manager Ben Chapman (Alan Tudyk) as he incessantly taunts and insults Robinson from the dugout. There are enough n-words tossed around here to make Tarantino blush.

Those scenes with Chapman are tough to sit through, but without them the film would be robbed of its manipulative power. 42 is aiming to be a PG-13 crowd-pleaser, but absolutely nothing will work if it doesn’t give us some kind of rock bottom. Those scenes provide us this rock bottom. The film does an admirable job of taking us right into the muck with Robinson despite the PG-13 rating, but once again Boseman deserves much of the credit. Every heartbreaking facial expression, every line delivery is exactly what it needs to be in order to work. He perfectly captures the character’s toughness, internalized rage, and ultimate desire to let his play do the talking. And oh, his play does plenty of talking. Robinson’s real-life career with the Dodgers was terrific, of course, but like many inspirational sports movies 42 makes its protagonist downright invincible. It’s all very conventional, down to the slow-motion home run at the film’s climax. (Spoiler alert, sorry.) But as we all know, even the most familiar clichés can work if they’re carried out in the right way. 42 is often distractingly standard, but it’s so well-performed and executed that many of these moments are actually able to carry some weight. Others fall flat, but that’s probably inevitable.

It speaks to the greatness of Boseman’s performance that one of my favorite scenes is just him standing alone in a room delivering a short monologue to his newborn child. Those few seconds not only teach us even more about Robinson as a character, but they also provide additional motivation for all that is to come later. 42 is not a great movie, obviously, but it knows all that it has to do in order to be effective. There aren’t that many risks taken, but its goal is not to be a gritty recreation of a segregated America. Its goal is to make audiences laugh, cry and cheer all across the world. On that level, it succeeds well enough. Writer/director Brian Helgeland deserves a lot of credit for knowing how to play our emotions like a fiddle, and normally I would resent something like that. But when the manipulation is as well-intentioned as it is here, and when the performances are this good, it’s hard to be too upset. Robinson is still seen as one of the most inspirational figures of the civil rights movement, and if there was ever a man who deserved the reverential biopic treatment, it was him. This reverence is both the movie’s blessing and its curse.

Grade: B