42: An Ordinary Movie About An Extraordinary Man

Jackie Robinson was a great man, both on and off the baseball field. On the field, he was an exceptional athlete who helped take the Brooklyn Dodgers to the World Series. But he was the only African-African playing for a Major League team, and off the field he put up with horrific hate and racism with a tremendous amount of dignity. Unfortunately, 42, the biopic depicting Robinson's season with the Montreal Royals and then the Dodgers, is a safe and insipid film that doesn't do justice to this man's legacy.

Biopics are a difficult genre and Hollywood always struggles to get them right. In 42, Chadwick Boseman and Nicole Beharie, who play Jackie Robinson and his wife Rachel, are the only actors who don't seem like caricatures. They do an admirable job of portraying the Robinsons' loving relationship and courageous determination to keep calm when routinely faced with injustice. But they cannot save a movie that seems determined to roll out every cliche in the book. Nearly every scene is accompanied by swelling music that seems to say, "You must start feeling feelings now! This is majestic and important, understood? No? Well, OK, we'll crescendo the violins to make our point." 

Harrison Ford plays Branch Rickey, the Dodgers owner who decided to hire Robinson in 1946 and break the color barrier. Ford is chewing so much scenery he must have gotten indigestion, but at least he has a substantial part to play. The other actors who play various managers or baseball players are merely trotted out to declaim some incredibly stilted dialogue and get neatly classified as a racist or a good guy. A few characters make the transition from racist to good guy, but this is done in as simplistic a manner as you could imagine, because biopics are rarely interested in moral complexity or messiness. Everything is black and white, and in this movie, that is both literally and figuratively true.

The only surprising thing about 42 is that it stays true to the racism of the period. It's rated PG-13, so there's no swearing per se, but apparently you can still get away with that rating if you liberally use the n-word in context. Alan Tudyk plays a particularly vile manager who hurls assorted racial epithets at Robinson throughout a game, and despite getting a rise out of Robinson's white teammate, Jackie himself refuses to engage with this odious man. That was the most admirable thing about Jackie Robinson, and the movie hammers that point home on multiple occasions, doing so with such a heavy hand that it almost becomes a less impressive feat.

Ultimately, 42 has nothing new to say. I found myself more interested by the few sentences written about Robinson and the ancillary characters in the closing credits than by anything that had happened in the entire movie. Perhaps if the film had looked at a longer stretch of time and considered more of his life rather than just focusing on the obvious bits of dealing with racists at baseball games, it would have been worthwhile. But instead, writer-director Brian Helgeland took the easy route, and manages to make a truly fascinating story seem positively prosaic.