42: Robinson’s story is a solid hit up the middle
April 19, 2013
By Kevin Hyde
April 19, 2013
I like bio-pics. I like period films. And I like movies about baseball. So you could say 42, the new film about Jackie Robinson’s barrier-breaking entry into Major League Baseball, was a hanging curveball right in my wheelhouse. And while this movie only has warning-track power, it’s definitely worth a look for anyone interested in the rich, often painful history of our fading national pastime.
I say fading because Major League Baseball has done more to disappoint and disenfranchise over the past 20 years than to delight and inspire. But 42 harkens back almost 70 years to the game’s golden era, when the Giants were in Upper Manhattan, the Dodgers were in Brooklyn and my beloved Chicago Cubs already had seen their last World Series.
I guess some things never change.
The film opens with the always annoying tagline, Based on a true story. Based. That’s pretty much the filmmakers saying, This is sort of how it went down, for the most part, but not totally. And we’re not going to tell you what bits we exaggerated, condensed or otherwise altered to make our movie palatable and entertaining.
Written and directed by Brian Helgeland (L.A. Confidential, Mystic River), 42 stars Harrison Ford as Branch Rickey, the Brooklyn Dodgers executive who in the opening scene announces to his associate, Harold Parrott (T.R. Knight), I’m going to bring a Negro to baseball. What Rickey was proposing was not against the law. It was worse. It was against unwritten law.
To make it work, he knew he needed to find a great baseball player but an even better person, because this man would be put through an unimaginable gauntlet of abuse and disdain by hostile fans and fellow players. His skin would need to be as thick as it was brown. Rickey found such a man in Jackie Robinson, played effectively in 42 by newcomer Chadwick Boseman.
Your enemy will be out in force, Rickey tells Robinson, while offering him a contract. But you cannot meet him on his own, low ground.
You want a player who doesn’t have the guts to fight back? Robinson asks.
No. I want a player who’s got the guts not to fight back.
Early on, the reason for introducing African Americans into baseball did not seem terribly righteous. Rickey wanted to draw more black fans to Ebbets Field. By the same token, Robinson was attracted to big league money. It is not until the two men are navigating the tempest that was Robinson’s ascent to the Majors—from spring training in racially inhospitable Sanford, Fla., to a season with a Brooklyn farm team to Robinson’s tumultuous rookie season with the Dodgers—that we learn the true reasons why these were the perfect people to integrate baseball.
Underneath it all is an endearing love story between Robinson and his young wife, Rachel, played memorably by Nicole Beharie. She is his foundation. She is the one he looks to in the stands when things are getting rough on the field. And things get very rough.
During his rookie season in the summer of 1947, Robinson was heckled relentlessly by both home and away fans. He was hit by pitches more times than any other batter that year by far, famously getting beaned in the head by Pittsburgh’s Fritz Ostermueller. In one particularly brutal scene, Philadelphia Phillies manager Ben Chapman (Alan Tudyk) relentlessly peppers Robinson with racial epithets, turning the whole batter, batter, batter, swing batter taunt into something infuriating and stomach churning.
The movie also depicts the conflicts and difficulties Robinson’s Dodger teammates felt about their new first basemen. It was heart-warming to see a dramatization of a legendary moment at Cincinnati’s Crosley Field, when future Hall of Fame Dodger shortstop Pee Wee Reese put his arm around Robinson and chatted with him between innings as the fans viciously jeered. Reese was from Louisville, Ky., just down the road from Cincinnati, and he was not only comforting his teammate but sending a message to his own people.
The cast of 42 is filled with a slew of recognizable character actors. When Burt Shotton, the long-time Cleveland Indians manager who is lured out of retirement to coach the Dodgers, is introduced, let me save many of you some agonizing. That’s Max Gail, most famously Det. Stan ‘Wojo’ Wojciehowicz on Barney Miller. You’re welcome.
But this is really Harrison Ford’s movie. I realized long ago that I had no desire to see him try to act. It can be painful. He should either imitate John Wayne (Han Solo) or play himself (Indiana Jones). That seems to be the limits of his range. But I was impressed and delighted by Ford’s performance in 42, which portends good things for his career as an older actor.
The reason it has taken so long for a Jackie Robinson movie to come along is probably the same reason 42 falls slightly flat. His introduction to Major League Baseball was fraught with drama, conflict and intrigue, but not the kind that lends itself very conveniently to a cinematic story arc. That’s why the film feels a tad contrived at times. But all and all it’s a solid effort—not a homerun but certainly a solid base hit.
Kevin Hyde is a freelance writer who has worked as a reporter for daily and weekly newspapers, edited regional and national magazines, written on pop culture for an international newspaper as well as several local, alternative newspapers. He can be reached at [email protected].
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