42

So, I'm pretty bad at sports.  Actually, I'm downright terrible.  As a child, I looked like an orange on a toothpick.  I would fall over with no warning, earning myself the nickname "Crash Carlson."  In two years of elementary school basketball, I scored one point.  It was a free throw.  In fifth grade, my dad decided to coach my basketball team.  He was a decent ball player back in high school and thought maybe some of those hoop genes had been passed on to me.  Not so much. That same year, I broke my arm playing soccer.  Someone kicked a ball at my arm.  It was on my birthday.  Yep.  Needless to say, I spent the next 7 years of fine Hoosier public education keeping my head down in gym class and avoided competitive sports at all costs.

Still, for some reason, I love sports movies.   I can't help but get caught up in films like 42, stories of underdogs overcoming insurmountable odds.  All my cynicism seems to subside when a basketball player makes an impossible shot or, in the case of 42, I see Jackie Robinson knock one out of the park.  Somehow, I can ignore the cheesy dialogue and clunky exposition and just enjoy the story.  I surely did that with 42.

The film focuses on the few years leading up to Jackie Robinson's history-making start for the Brooklyn Dodgers.  Narrowing his scope, writer/director Brian Helgeland avoids the pitfalls of many biopics.  While films like Ray and The Aviator feel like they have no center and fumble about like this girl who grabbed my junk at the bar last weekend (I'll tell you the story later), 42 is streamlined and concise in its treatment of Jackie Robinson's life.  Helgeland shows how the real struggle didn't happen on the field, but rather in the offices of team owners like Branch Rickey (Harrison Ford) and on the streets of the prejudiced South.

The director has a fine grasp of the time period, having written post-war period films like LA Confindential.  The dialogue displays the cadence of a 1940s Frank Capra or Howard Hawks picture.  The production design is evocative.  The chrome fenders gleam and the tweed jackets, well...I'm not sure what tweed does, but it looks authentic.

The film is served well by the winning performance of Chadwick Boseman.  Some of the lines Helgeland threw Boseman were obvious balls but he turned them into home runs.  Sorry, that's a really bad analogy.  I couldn't help myself.  I guarantee you'll read similar lines in the Associated Press reviews.   Boseman performs all his dialogue with great sincerity and subdues the cheese.

He is assisted here by Harrison Ford, who portrays the pioneering Branch Rickey with gravelly voice and gruff personality.  I love Harrison Ford.  When I was six years old, I walked up to my parents, looking very solemn.  I confessed that I wished Harrison Ford were my real father.  Even though my dad didn't coach me to glory in the fifth grade, I'm pretty sure he made a better father than Harrison Ford could have done.   Still, Han Solo and Indiana Jones have long acted as my guardian angels.  That being said, I have never considered Harrison Ford to be an actor with a wide range.  In 42, he doesn't completely disappear into the role, and I often found myself watching my old friend Harrison playing dress up.  At other times, he and Boseman have great chemistry.  Though uneven, his acting does not hinder the story.

And what an important story it is to tell.  I was lucky enough to see the film with a full audience, largely African-American.  In a scene where Robinson deftly steals home, the audience broke into great applause.  We all cringed and gasped at the horrible obscenities spoken by conservative whites.  When the various racist rednecks in the film get their comeuppance, we all laughed.  And we cheered when those racists in the film started to change their views on Robinson.  It was an infectious experience, and I could feel a lot of hope in the theater.

Still, I worry that this hope may be lost on some viewers.  My main problem with films like 42 is that I believe they ask us to remember the past only to forget it.  The more awful the racist obscenities are, the easier it is for some to say, "Oh, that's in the past.  Look how far we've come.  Things are so different now."  Some viewers may miss such dialogue like, "This isn't the country I was born in."  This line is spoken by the racist pitcher Kirby Higbe (Brad Beyer), and it sounds very similar to posts I saw on Facebook following the re-election of President Obama. It’s hard for me to believe that we have moved past those racist times when half my country still doesn't think President Obama was born in America.  Sorry for the spoiler, but he was.  I did hear a convincing argument by this meathead who said that he thinks Obama was born in Hawaii, but he doesn't consider Hawaii part of America.  Smart stuff.

In the end, I think I left the film feeling too comfortable.  When I watch films like Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing, I see how complex race relations are in America.  I see that I have a part in the racial oppression.  I feel guilty.  Looking to the 1940s in a film like 42, I feel that I fall into the trap that many viewers do.  I think about how I am so different from slack-jawed bigots in 1947 Florida.  I feel innocent.  Maybe both views of race are important, the hopeful and the cynical.

Still, I cannot ignore the faces of the children I saw exiting the theater, both black and white.  There was a look of happiness and excitement on their faces.  In 42, they saw that great obstacles can be overcome and that people can change.  Like the many trains in the film (a nice motif), we are moving forward and times will get better.  See, these films make me ignore cheesy dialogue, even in my own reviews.