by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2014 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was 42, a
quite remarkable production from Warner Bros. and Legendary Pictures last year,
written and directed by Brian
Helgeland and telling the story of Jackie Robinson and how he integrated Major
League Baseball as a player for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947. Charles wondered
why the film was given so enigmatic a title as 42 — the number of Jackie Robinson’s uniform (and for
the 50th anniversary of his major-league debut in 1947 Baseball
Commissioner Bud Selig announced that the number 42 would be permanently
retired by all the major-league teams, though players currently using 42 would
be grandfathered in and be allowed to keep that number until they retire) —
instead of something including Jackie Robinson’s name in the title. He assumed
that far more viewers interested in Robinson’s tale but not overall baseball
fans would have been attracted to a film called Jackie Robinson than one called 42, but there had already been a film about him from
1950 called The Jackie Robinson Story with Robinson playing himself on screen and the fine Black actress
Ruby Dee as his wife Rachel. (Ruby Dee was the person I would have liked to see
star in the film adaptation of Billie Holiday’s autobiography, Lady
Sings the Blues, with Billie’s own records
used to represent her inimitable singing; instead, of course, the film got
turned into a putrid vehicle for Diana Ross, who actually did a decent job
given how horrendously miscast she was but got saddled with a script that
scrapped the truth of Billie’s life story — including scenes she described in
the book that would have made great
movie sequences — and substituted the most God-awful Hollywood clichés.) I have
a VHS tape of this film and was able to find a download of The Jackie
Robinson Story on archive.org, though about
my only serious memory of it is that for some reason the screenwriter decided
to change the name of the team Robinson played for in the Negro Leagues from
the Kansas City Monarchs to the “Black Panthers”! Anyway, 42 turned out to be an excellent movie, mainly because
though it’s a recent film it’s told in a deliberately old-fashioned style, with
long takes, well framed compositions and, at least in the exteriors (including
the scenes actually representing baseball games), a realistic sense of color
instead of the dirty-aquarium look all too common these days. The film lasts
128 minutes but manages not to seem padded (as too many modern films that push
past the two-hour mark do), and what makes it work is the fine cast as well as
Helgeland’s understated writing. While there’s a sense at some points that he’s
cherry-picking Robinson’s real life for material he can structure along the
familiar Hollywood clichés of the success movie as well as the sports movie,
he’s also a highly talented screenwriter working over material that plays to
his strengths as a director. It’s interesting that his previous writing credits
include films for actor-directors like Clint Eastwood (Mystic River) and Kevin Costner (The Postman), because Helgeland’s work here shows the same kind
of understated acting generally found in films made by actor-directors.
His
cast is near-perfect; as Robinson he found a young performer named Chadwick
Boseman (who alas is being run through the superhero meatgrinder; after this
film he did another Black biopic,
Get On Up, about James Brown —
thereby playing both sides of what used to be called the “Willie Mays-Louis
Armstrong syndrome,” in which Black people were assumed to have only two
avenues of success available to them: sports and entertainment — and he’s
currently playing a superhero called the “Black Panther” in the Marvel
universe, just as Tobey Maguire got plucked away from promising roles like his
wide-eyed aspiring young Gay writer in Wonder Boys to play Spider-Man) who’s absolutely right, wiry,
formidably athletic and also able to portray the torture Robinson went through,
not only from the racist abuse he got from teammates, opponents and audience
members alike, but from the ongoing injunction he was under not to show any temper and especially not to fight back.
He’s matched by Nicole Beharie as his wife Rachel (or “Rae,” as he called her
and she’s usually addressed in the film), a deceptively meek-looking slip of a
young Black woman who turns out, if anything, to be more racially militant in
asserting her civil rights than her husband, especially in a scene in which she
uses a whites-only restroom at an airport and gets both herself and Jackie
thrown off the plane they were waiting for. But the real star of the movie is
Harrison Ford as Branch Rickey, the general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers,
who turns in a wonderfully authoritative old-salt performance as a marvelously
ambiguous character, who claims his only motivations for bringing in a Black
player and breaking down the color line of Major League Baseball are to tap a
previously unexploited talent pool and draw African-American audiences into
Ebbets Field, but who — like Robinson himself — is obviously aware of the
racial minefield he’s stepping into and the way hiring a Black player is going
to make him a civil-rights pioneer whether he wants to be one or not.
Helgeland’s well-structured script includes the character of Black reporter
Wendell Smith (André Holland), who introduces himself to Robinson as “your
Boswell” (Robinson responds with a stare of blank incomprehension — though
given that he’d gone to UCLA I had a hard time believing he’d graduated without
having at least heard of John Boswell) and follows him around as chauffeur,
bodyguard, early-warning system and civil-rights conscience.
What’s most remarkable
about 42 is it depicts the racism
Robinson had to contend with honestly and believably without hitting us over
the head with it; Helgeland realized that the reality was so ugly, from the
constant uses of the word “nigger” (notably from the Philadelphia Phillies’
manager, Ben Chapman, who goads Robinson so vilely and insistently when the
Dodgers and Phillies play each other he, like some of the other white players,
seems more interested in goading Robinson into an embarrassing fight than in
beating him and the Dodgers on the field) to the ugly central-casting “cracker”
stereotype who comes out to see Wendell Smith one night and says if Robinson is
still there in the morning … well, the exact threat is left chillingly
unspecified but it sounds like the Ku Klux Klan is going to lynch him (and the
counterbalancing old white guy who looks just as “redneck” but turns out to be
supportive, saying that in America it shouldn’t matter what color a man is if
he can deliver the goods); and the supercilious hotel manager who cancels the
reservations of the entire Dodger team when the team bus arrives and Robinson
is on it. (Robinson, true to what we know about his real-life character as well
as the way he’s drawn in this movie, offers to spend the night somewhere else
if the hotel will honor the reservations of the white men on the team, but to
no avail.) There’s also the chilling scene in which the white Dodgers circulate
a petition to Rickey telling him they will refuse to play if a Black man is on
their team — including one who makes such a big to-do about it that Rickey
offers to trade him to another team if he still feels that way by the trading
deadline (only by the time of the deadline, he’s changed his mind, come to
value Robinson as a teammate, and withdraws his request for a trade). I
remember talking about Jackie Robinson to a friend and explaining that, given
that sports is one human endeavor in which the outcomes are a matter of
statistical record — points scored, games won, end-of-season standings and the
myriad other statistics baseball fans (more than those of any other sport)
obsess over — Robinson’s success was measurable in objective terms. Before he
joined the Dodgers in 1947, the team had made the World Series only once (in
1941); during the ten years he played for them they made the World Series six
times and won it once (in 1955), a record which led not only the Dodgers but
other teams in the majors to recruit Black players to get some of that
comparative advantage for themselves.
The theme of the movie is eloquently
expressed in a scene between Robinson and Rickey in which Rickey tells him that
under no circumstances must he respond to the racial taunts in public no matter
how bad they get — then, Rickey
says, audiences won’t remember that the Black man was provoked; all they’ll
remember is that the Black man started a fight — and Robinson says, “You mean
you want someone who doesn’t have the guts to fight back?” “No,” says Rickey,
“I want someone who has the guts not
to fight back.” Throughout the film Helgeland delicately balances the story of
Jackie Robinson’s inner turmoil (including the spectacular scene in which he
holds it together in public but loses it as soon as he gets in the hallway
between the field and the dressing rooms, then beats the shit out of the walls
with his bat — “Who does he think he is, me?” I found myself asking myself)
with the story of the Dodgers’ 1947 pennant race and the ways Robinson’s
presence both hurt them and helped them; it was a major distraction from the
business of winning ballgames but it was also a major distraction for everyone
else they played, and in particular the opponents who were goaded by Robinson’s
presence on the field to obsess over him and make stupid mistakes (in one
scene, an opposing pitcher gets so discomfited by Robinson he drops the ball on
the mound and the batter gets a base on balls and walks Robinson home). One
typical trope of baseball movies is showing Robinson as a major home-run
hitter, which he wasn’t; his skills were fielding and base-running (and the
film does show him stealing
bases, including one famous game in which he stole home, something that almost
never happens).
Overall, 42 is a
great movie, ranking alongside The Pride of the Yankees, Eight Men
Out and Moneyball in my personal pantheon of baseball films, though my
hero Christopher Meloni is somewhat wasted in the role of Dodgers manager Leo
Durocher (that’s Hollywood anti-typecasting at its worst, casting tall,
muscular Meloni as short, wiry Durocher — almost as bad as casting short, wiry
Tom Cruise as Lee Child’s character Jack Reacher, a role that should have been
Meloni’s almost by divine right!); though we get a scene of him naked from the
waist up in bed with a woman (“So that’s why you wanted to watch this movie!” Charles joked), shortly
thereafter he’s banned from baseball for a year by Commissioner Happy Chandler
(a former Southern governor who, ironically, lost his chance to be George
Wallace’s running mate for vice-president in 1968 because he had presided over
baseball when it became integrated) for an affair with said woman, a Hollywood
star carefully unnamed in Helgeland’s script (it was Laraine Day) and Rickey
has to dredge up Bert Shotton (Max Gail — so a veteran of Law and
Order: Special Victims Unit is replaced by
a veteran of my other all-time favorite cop show on TV, Barney Miller!) out of retirement to manage his team through the
minefields of a close pennant race and a civil-rights battle. Ironically,
baseball is now the least
racially integrated of America’s major team sports, mainly because it’s lost
its “cool” factor and young Black athletes are more inclined to pursue football
or basketball — and the major-domos of Major League Baseball are once again
wondering how to get people of color to buy tickets to their games when there
aren’t that many people who look like them on the teams.
