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If you retold Adventures of Huckleberry Finn<\/em> by moving it several hundred miles upriver, replacing Huck with an older, craftier version of his friend Tom Sawyer and making Jim a younger, more articulate family man, you might well have the true-life, mid-20th-century\u2019s Greatest Story Ever Told: How Branch Rickey and Jackie Robinson engaged on a perilous two-man odyssey to force racial integration down major-league baseball\u2019s throat and make America like it. The difference being that Huck, in refusing to turn Jim over to slave hunters, only thought he was going to hell. Jackie Robinson, throughout that trailblazing 1947 season of triumph and torment (mostly the latter), came as close to an earthbound purgatory as any mortal should have endured.<\/p>\n It\u2019s a story that, much like Huck\u2019s, never loses its power to simultaneously unsettle and inspire. And as with Twain\u2019s masterpiece, no feature film could adequately do it justice, though at least one, The Jackie Robinson Story<\/em> (1950), made a crude, earnest attempt with the genuine article sportingly, if woodenly, starring as himself. (It\u2019s still interesting to see as a curio of its time and for watching two of our greatest actresses, Ruby Dee and Louise Beavers, on-screen even if they\u2019re only playing silhouettes of Robinson\u2019s real-life wife and mother respectively.)<\/p>\n 42<\/em>, the freshest rendition of the Jackie Robinson parable, is shinier and more authentic than its predecessor \u2013 which doesn\u2019t mean it\u2019s any less earnest or doggedly elemental in its execution. I would have no trouble whatsoever exposing a young girl or boy to Brian Helgeland\u2019s digitally enhanced diorama. (It should probably come with one of those labels Milton Bradley used to put on its board-game boxes saying, \u201cAges 7-14.\u201d) As Robinson, Chadwick Boseman emits the same smoldering intensity as the genuine article while suggesting, at times, some of the prickly-heat feistiness the major leagues would see once he no longer had to turn the other cheek. His scenes with Nicole Beharie as Rachel Robinson have a genuine ardor and unassuming sweetness rare in any movie with an African-American romantic couple. I\u2019d be tempted to say it was a breakthrough for black movies if I thought the movie was all about them. And it isn\u2019t.<\/p>\n For what the story of Jackie Robinson\u2019s trial-by-fire has by now become (in ways that Huckleberry Finn<\/em> never could) is an occasion for America in general and white people in particular to congratulate themselves on their capacity for change. Boseman\u2019s Robinson may have more dimensions than the version Robinson himself enacted sixty-something years ago. But he is still less a fully fleshed character than a stoic presence, sustaining unspeakable punishment for his country\u2019s sins. This doesn\u2019t in any way mitigate his heroism or importance. But much as America\u2019s astronauts, however fearless, were basically instruments of their country\u2019s scientific and political will, Robinson was the instrument of one man\u2019s far-sighted vision \u2013 and determination to overcome his own shame for his beloved game\u2019s racial myopia .<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n We\u2019re talking, of course, about Branch Rickey, 42<\/em>\u2019s true protagonist, the man who pulled the strings for this \u201cgreat experiment\u201d and made sure none of them were clipped. There sometimes seemed almost as many leading men in Hollywood yearning to play Rickey as there were wanting to play Chet Baker, though a far more motley group in the latter queue. Harrison Ford makes the most of his rare opportunity to go big, broad and hard. I hear some gripes about Ford going too far over the top \u2013 which discloses nothing so much as the complainers\u2019 ignorance of baseball history. Outside of, say, Bill Veeck, Larry McPhail and George Steinbrenner, Branch Rickey is the only baseball executive whose larger-than-life presence is worthy of a movie. If anything, Ford seems at times a little too conscious of Rickey\u2019s many facets (which, in Red Smith\u2019s immortal turn-of-phrase, were all turned on). But it\u2019s such an endearing performance throughout that you even enjoy Ford\u2019s straining to get it just right.<\/p>\n The rest of the actors pretty much carry out their roles in this parable as expected, though history would have been better served by showing that Philadelphia Phillies manager Ben Chapman (the admirable, under-appreciated Alan Tudyk) wasn\u2019t the only one in that team\u2019s dugout ragging Robinson so viciously. (The late Richie Ashburn was one of the few players on that team in that era who owned up to such taunting and expressed his deep regret for it.) Poor old Dixie Walker (Ryan Merriman) must once again be properly humiliated for trying to whip up his white Dodger teammates in opposition to Robinson \u2013 though in later years, he pleaded for forgiveness from the press and public. As for Christopher Meloni\u2019s Leo Durocher, he\u2019s such a magnetically funny and vividly rendered character in his precious few moments onscreen that when he\u2019s compelled to leave the team (and the movie), you wish you could follow him out the locker room door to watch what happens to him \u2013 and, of course, Laraine Day (Jud Tylor). There\u2019s another movie waiting to be made, and if they\u2019re smart, they\u2019ll let Meloni continue in the role.<\/p>\n As for 42,<\/em> it may not cut as deep as most of us would like. But it may say something about my own diminished expectations of Hollywood that I doubt we\u2019re going to get a better movie version of this story for some time to come. Dioramas and comic books are what sell in the multiplexes these days and as long as the outlines and colors are reasonably aligned and the proper emotions are aroused, then I\u2019m willing to settle for harmlessness as a virtue; just as long as nobody tries to sell 42<\/em> as genuine progress. Popular culture as a whole still can\u2019t accommodate the complexity of a real-life Jackie Robinson who in the years since his arduous rookie season was fueled by unceasing rage and uncompromising passion for justice<\/a>. Indeed, Hollywood movies in general still can\u2019t adequately deal with emotional complexity of any kind — and may have stopped trying.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" If you retold Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by moving it several hundred miles upriver, replacing Huck with an older, craftier version of his friend Tom Sawyer and making Jim a younger, more articulate family man, you might well have the true-life, mid-20th-century\u2019s Greatest Story Ever Told: How Branch Rickey and Jackie […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[124],"tags":[224,218,220,212,223,219,214,221,213,211,222,217,216,215],"class_list":["post-686","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie-reviews","tag-224","tag-adventures-of-huckleberry-finn","tag-alan-tudyk","tag-branch-rickey","tag-brian-helgeland","tag-brooklyn-dodgers","tag-chadwick-boseman","tag-christopher-meloni","tag-harrison-ford","tag-jackie-robinson","tag-leo-durocher","tag-mark-twain","tag-nicole-beharie","tag-rachel-robinson"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/686","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=686"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/686\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2796,"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/686\/revisions\/2796"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=686"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=686"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=686"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/04\/harrison-ford-jackie-robinson-movie-42-300x181.jpg\")
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