Movie Review 42 Jackie Robinson Breaking Color Barrier in Baseball Summary
Picture show Review
That Rookie at First Is in a New Position
Video
- 42
- Directed past Brian Helgeland
- Biography, Drama, Sport
- PG-13
- 2h 8m
Biographies of great athletes can be roughly sorted into three categories. There are hero-worshiping fables suitable for fourth-grade classrooms, scandalous feet-of-clay exposés and, rarest of all, narratives that link sports with meaning, nonathletic historical events and social issues. In America those events and bug almost always have to exercise with race, which makes the life of Jackie Robinson specially ripe for sweeping, comprehensive treatment.
Simply while "42," Brian Helgeland'due south new flick about Robinson, gestures toward the complicated and painful history in which its subject was embroiled, it belongs, similar most sports biopics, in the first category. It is blunt, simple and sentimental, using fourth dimension-tested methods to teach a clear and rousing lesson.
In other hands — Spike Lee's, let'southward say, or even Clint Eastwood's — "42" might have taken a tougher, more contentious look at the breaking of Major League Baseball's color barrier. But Mr. Helgeland, whose previous directing credits include "Payback" and "A Knight'southward Tale" (and who wrote "Blood Work" and "Mystic River," speaking of Clint Eastwood), has honorably sacrificed the chance to make a great movie in the involvement of making one that is accessible and inspiring. Though not accurate in every particular, the movie mostly succeeds in respecting the facts of history and the personality of its hero, and in reminding audiences why he mattered.
After a clumsy and didactic first — in which every scene ends with Mark Isham's score screaming "This Is Of import!" in Dolby — the movie settles into a solid, foursquare rhythm. By then nosotros accept met Robinson, played with sly amuse and a hint of stubborn prickliness by Chadwick Boseman.
A shortstop for the Kansas Metropolis Monarchs of the Negro leagues, a 4-sport athlete at U.C.L.A. and a commissioned Regular army officer during Earth War II, Robinson has been selected past Branch Rickey (Harrison Ford) to go the first African-American major leaguer of the modern era. Subsequently some time with the Dodgers' minor-league chapter in Montreal, Robinson, at present married and with a baby (his wife, Rachel, is played by Nicole Beharie), starts at first base, wearing No. 42, for the Dodgers on opening solar day in 1947.
The story of what happened before and after that game has been told well before — in Arnold Rampersad's biography and in parts of Ken Burns'due south "Baseball," for instance — but "42" does a skilful job of dramatizing the salient emotions of the moment and the racism that surrounded Robinson and every other black American of his time. To his credit Mr. Helgeland avoids the trap that so many depictions of the Jim Crow era fall into, which is to imply that racial prejudice was an private or regional pathology rather than a national social norm.
Prototype 
So while there are a handful of snarling Southern bigots — most notably Ben Chapman (Alan Tudyk), the managing director of the Philadelphia Phillies — their actions are treated not as exceptions to the rule simply as peculiarly ugly instances of it. Robinson is threatened and harassed past vigilantes and police force officers in Florida during his showtime jump training, but white fans in the North, Brooklyn included, are hardly shy about showering him with boos and slurs when he takes the field.
The other players — including Robinson's own teammates — are non much amend. He is spiked by base runners and beaned by pitchers. A petition circulates in the Dodgers' clubhouse enervating his removal from the team, and rival owners telephone call Rickey demanding the same thing.
As I said: a well-known story. But information technology is useful for immature viewers to have a await at the world their grandparents were born into, a globe that is however frequently given, in movies and on television, a glow of cornball innocence.
Of course there was decency and courage likewise, here embodied by Rickey, the Dodgers pitcher Ralph Branca (Hamish Linklater) — i of the merely Brooklyn players to shake Robinson'southward mitt when he starting time walks into the locker room — and the shortstop Pee Wee Reese (Lucas Black), whose public embrace of Robinson earlier a game in Cincinnati is the emotional high indicate of the movie. But "42" does not give these men disproportionate credit for passing a adequately easy examination of grapheme that near of the land was proud to neglect, and it does not pretend that Robinson'south story is actually theirs.
His triumph is edged with bitterness and adumbral by profound loneliness. In spite of Rachel's steadfast support and the enthusiasm of black fans, Robinson is surrounded by hostility and past people who, even if they are on his side, cannot brainstorm to sympathize his feel. When Rickey describes his new role player as "superhuman," he is bestowing a curse in the form of praise, and identifying a paradox central to postwar racial politics. To be accepted equally human, as equal to whites, the black pioneers of the era had to rise in a higher place all kinds of ordinary human being temptations — to fight back, to testify anger or fear — and become flawless exemplars of their race.
"42" not only identifies this burden simply likewise surrenders to it. Robinson, the film'south undisputed hero, is in some ways its to the lowest degree interesting graphic symbol. Rickey is a cigar-chomping, Scripture-spouting erstwhile coot; Leo Durocher (Christopher Meloni), the Dodgers' manager, is a cynical womanizer who speaks in cracked aphorisms, while the radio broadcaster Red Hairdresser (a wonderful John C. McGinley) extemporizes jewels of English prose.
In contrast, the main African-American figures in the story — Jackie, Rachel and the announcer Wendell Smith (Andre Holland) — seem a little stiff, unable to be themselves in their own story. Which may just exist to say that the cultural transformation in which Jackie Robinson played a significant early on role is still incomplete.
"42" is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). Some rough language, including racial epithets.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/12/movies/42-with-chadwick-boseman-as-jackie-robinson.html
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