A review of "42"

Good, not great. Certainly entertaining, and a good introduction for a new generation to Robinson and what he had to endure. It wasn’t sublime, and I was hoping for sublime, but I’ll take pretty good. It’s a helluva lot better than the only other Robinson biography on film, “The Jackie Robinson Story,” the 1950 movie that starred Robinson himself and showed that he was as bad an actor as he was great as a ballplayer and human being.

Which might have been part of the problem with this movie, too. In life, Robinson was distant and quiet and kept his emotions out of public life, a habit learned no doubt during that 1947 season. That made it difficult to play even himself in his biopic, and Chadwick Boseman has his work cut out for him, too. Here, Robinson comes across as two dimensional and (no pun intended) colorless, no doubt because he was so distant and showed so little of himself. Credit to Boseman for giving it what he can, especially in the meltdown scene after the vicious taunting from Ben Chapman (more on that later), but bringing an inscrutable personality like Robinson to life is difficult.

The best work here is by Harrison Ford, who disappears into a role for the first time since……..um……..Well, yeah. Anyway, Ford takes the secondary role of Branch Rickey and gives him heart and humanity, showing us little glimpses of his motivations in breaking the color line. Yes, he wanted to sell tickets and make money and win the World Series for the Dodgers, but his Methodist motivations and Christian decency also drove him—he wanted to save baseball from itself—and Ford brings that out in nicely subtle touches.

The supporting roles are well acted, and the film doesn’t shy from the ugly moments as Robinson tried to drag baseball and the country forward. The scenes with the Phillies’ monstrously racist manager Chapman are especially uncomfortable, but they’re effective in accurately showing what African-Americans had to endure in the days before integration.

Also great is the CGI. I feel like I can now add Ebbets Field to the list of ballparks I’ve visited.

If I had one big beef about the movie, it’s the way it insists on beating the audience over the head by artificially heightening scenes that are already inherently dramatic (this was the birth of the modern civil rights movement, after all, what’s more dramatic than that?). The ridiculously swelling score, the corny lines (“maybe the kid really is superhuman after all”) only added a phony and unneeded gloss on what was dramatic to begin with.

“42” didn’t live up to my expectations (it’s no “The Natural” or “Field of Dreams”), and there’s really nothing new here for anyone who’s already read a decent Robinson biography or baseball history. But it brings the familiar to life well, and is worth seeing.