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"FacebookPinterest\n\n \"42\" was the number on Jackie Robinson's Brooklyn Dodgers jersey when he became the first African American to play for a major-league baseball team in 1947. That explains the title of writer-director Brian Helgeland's reverential new biopic, which stars Chadwick Boseman in an ace impersonation of Robinson along with a not-so-hot Harrison Ford as Dodgers ec Branch Rickey.\n\nStill, you'd hardly blame Helgeland if he meant for moviegoers to catch the subliminal link between No. 42 and No. 44\u2014i.e., Barack Obama. Predating Rosa Parks's refusal to quit her Montgomery bus seat by eight years, Robinson's one-man integration of our national pastime was Jim Crow's first big postwar setback. We know who did the ultimate Baskin-Robbins sixty-odd years later when it came to crashing all-vanilla American institutions, adding a certain where-it-all-began resonance to Robinson's story. So it's kind of a shame that 42 isn't much good.\n\nA few unspeakably tacky moments of \"poetic\" audience manipulation aside, the movie isn't disgraceful or horrible. Of course not. Any earnest high-school teacher who shows 42 to his or her history class down the road won't be damaging them too much, except aesthetically. But how that seems to define Helgeland's target audience tells you everything you need to know. Rarely has piety so obviously been a form of superficiality.\n\nOne proof we'd best not get misty-eyed in too big a hurry is that, even today\u2014just ask Lincoln's nonfans\u2014any mainstream movie about a crucial transformation in black America's life had damned well better flatter the white audience by prominently making some honky with leverage a deus ex machina. That's why Ford's Branch Rickey is essentially the Gepetto to Boseman/Robinson's Pinocchio. We're shown nothing of Robinson's formative years, which were uncommon enough in those benighted times to include getting into UCLA and serving as an officer\u2014not an enlisted man\u2014during World War II. Here, he's just simmering clay waiting for God's pointing finger, with Rickey going through dossiers in search of the ideal candidate like Jim Phelps in the old TV version of Mission: Impossible. \n\nIn itself, that isn't inaccurate. After all, Rosa Parks was chosen for her mission too. But the hefty, often unmistakably padded amount of screen time Rickey gets still feels like a distortion of Robinson's story, albeit an unsurprising one. Odds are that including a fat part for a Caucasian box-office name was the only way Helgeland could get 42 financed on this scale.\n\nIf so, by way of retribution, Harrison Ford's woeful performance could give box-office names a bad name. Character roles aren't his specialty, people. Talking in a punchdrunk W.C. Fields rasp as he wiggles his bushy eyebrows and waggles his cigar, he's about as believable as Mr. Magoo playing Harry Truman.\n\nWhile I don't often think \"Christ, where's Robin Williams when you need him?\", the part would require a much more gifted and wily overactor than Ford is to work even at a crowd-pleasing level. That's thanks to Helgeland's conception of Rickey as a cantankerous but lovable old coot with a heart of gold masked by his pretense that he wants black MLB players only to line his coffers by drawing black fans. In other words, what may have been Rickey's genuine motive\u2014or one of them, anyhow\u2014gets turned into his con.\n\nIn the sort-of title role, on the other hand\u2014he's not a number, dammit, he's a man\u2014Boseman's casting can't be faulted. He looks acceptably like the real Robinson, and this compelling actor (also a playwright, which may explain a lot) has an appetite for complexity that Helgeland's script can't feed. The subtle workings of his face\u2014the stubborn jaw played off against a rare smile, the questing eyes of a brainy man who doesn't want being an uplift-the-race role model to cost him his individuality\u2014are the best, least sentimental thing in the movie except for Nicole Beharie in a few scenes as Robinson's wife, Rachel. Beharie, who was also the best thing in Steve McQueen's Shame a couple of years back, has such loopy comic magnetism early on \u00C2\u00A0that it's a drag once Jackie's fame reduces her to loyal Mrs. Role Model.\n\nAside from bits here and there, the script also doesn't give Boseman any real opportunity to go deep on Robinson's internal conflicts, which must have been fierce. As a result, too much of the time, we're in the uncomfortable position of watching a stoic black man do what a benign white one has told him to. Even the big scene when Robinson can't take it anymore\u2014leaving the dugout after one racial taunt too many from Phillies manager Ben Chapman (Alan Tudyk, first-rate) to smash his bat against the wall and weep\u2014ends with Ford's Rickey looming over him, godlike, to speak words of wisdom as a crumpled, abject Robinson listens from below. That gauche bit of staging makes one wince, as does another of Helgeland's ineptitudes: The game is still underway just yards from where they're having their heart-to-heart, and yet its hubbub goes silent during their conversation so we won't miss one dreary word.\n\nBecause it's never hard to recruit actors for a baseball flick\u2014c'mon, they're only human\u201442 is packed with good ones in small parts: Tudyk, Max Gail, T.R. Knight, John C. McGinley (as sports columnist Red Barber), Christopher Meloni (as Dodgers manager Leo Durocher, who's sorely missed once he's out of the picture). One standout is Lucas Black as Pee Wee Reese, the Kentucky-born Dodgers shortstop who ends up as Robinson's primary ally. Typically, though, Helgeland wrecks Black's big scene\u2014Reese defiantly putting his arm around Robinson's shoulder in front of a racist Cincinatti crowd\u2014by milking it too much, including cutaways to an impossibly cute white kid who's all set to mimic his bigoted pop's catcalls until he sees the light thanks to Pee Wee. His counterpart is the impossibly adorable African American tyke\u2014allegedly based on future Mets infielder Ed Charles\u2014whose worshipful eyes telegraph what an inspiration Robinson will be to the next generation of black folk.\n\nOn the plus side, 42's re-creation of the 1940s is impressive enough as these things go. Too often, however, the period decor just sits there on the screen. The director can't convince us it's his characters' organic environment, which is what gives period decor meaning.\n\nMaybe worse, Helgeland didn't even convince me he digs baseball. That's not a trivial failing in this context. As James Baldwin once wrote, the black students who conducted the first lunch-counter sit-ins weren't actually fighting for the right to eat crappy food. In other words, you wouldn't need to be crazy about second-rate tuna sandwiches to make a good movie about them. But if Robinson's example did anything to shift white baseball fans' attitudes on race, it wasn't because he made them discover their passion for equality in the abstract. It was because they realized they loved the game too much to say no."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.gq.com/story/tom-carson-reviews-42-jackie-robinson-doesnt-get-the-movie-he-deserves>