O.K., so if you're looking for a review of 42 that lists all of the historical inaccuracies, this ain't it.  (Try here and here.)  Also, if you're thinking I'm going to talk about how the movie sidesteps still thorny issues of racism, I'm not going to do that, either.  I go to the movies.  I go to baseball games.  I go to baseball movies.  I saw this movie with my 11 year-old baseball player.  42 is an awesome baseball movie.

As you probably know, 42 chronicles the two years leading up to and including the 1947 season that Jackie Robinson played with the Brooklyn Dodgers, which would mark the beginning of the integration of major league baseball.  Robinson is played by Chadwick Boseman, in what seems to be his largest role yet.  Dodgers owner Branch Rickey is played by Harrison Ford, in a smaller role than usual.  They are both very good in their roles, with the screenplay giving Ford the job of articulating the moral heart of the story.  At one point, you feel bad for Pee Wee Reese, who comes to Rickey to express his reluctance to play in a game against Cincinnati, close to his Kentucky hometown, because he received a nasty letter about Reese's playing on a team with Robinson.  Then, Rickey goes to a file cabinet and shoves piles of death threats that Robinson has received in front of Reese and shuts him up.  Rickey is also the Jiminy Cricket for Robinson, warning him of what he has to face and then giving him the pep talk when he faces it. 

Lots of commentators have mentioned how the movie makes the racism of the day palatable (the racists are shown up in some way, the milder reluctant baseball players are brought around), but to a fifth grader in 2013, the racism is shocking, particularly Phillies' manager Ben Chapman's nonstop racist trash talk.  That scene is hard to watch, though I know those words and insults were not rare then and not extinct now.  Perhaps that isolated scene and the few milder ones dn't do the situation justice, but I think they get the message across.

Historical sports movies are hard (Miracle, 61* ) because most of the audience is going to know how the movie ends.  So, the trick is to create some sort of suspense beyond the outcome of a single event.  In 42, the second half of the movie is broadly about the pennant and the World Series, but the tension is in the "game within the game."  The movie plays a lot of small ball with the audience -- Will Jackie steal this base, get this hit, throw off this pitcher, or be thrown off by hecklers?  I have to say that I was along for the ride.  I literally cheered at stolen bases and at hits; I groaned and covered my eyes at strikes and pop flies.

Naysayers will say don't watch it because of the historical inaccuracies or liberties taken.  Sure, a pitcher is shown as right-handed, not left-handed.  The Dodgers' announcer is shown traveling to away games, but he did not until much later.  The movie doesn't mention that Robinson tried out for the Red Sox years earlier, or that other African-Americans followed Robinson very quickly into the major leagues.  These problems do not hinder the movie.  Some conversations and actions are necessarily fictionalized or at least merely educated guesses.  Until the season was over, the world was not recording it as a season that would make history.  The kicker for me is that it is a great baseball movie about a great even in baseball history, one that has many lessons to teach today.  And the fact that my son really loved it.

Film | Bookmark

TrackBack URL for this entry:
https://www.typepad.com/services/trackback/6a00d8345157d569e20192ab216a94970d

Links to weblogs that reference Family Film Blogging: 42: