Is the movie 42 a sports biopic or the other kind? That’s a legitimate question. Usually with the sports biopic, the purpose of the movie is to show how the subject (or team of subjects) managed to get together to win the big game at the end of the movie, usually in a two hour time span. The one I refer to as “the other kind” is more about someone, usually a famous someone, overcoming adversity to do the great thing that person is known for and may cover the subject’s entire life in a two hour time span.
I think it might be closer to the latter, and that’s OK. Jackie Robinson’s story isn’t about winning the big game. It’s about winning at life.
But something struck me as I watched 42, and that’s that the movie at times doesn’t seem to be about Jackie Robinson. True, we do get to see a lot of what Robinson (Chadwick Boseman in his first major cinematic starring role) does on and off the field. He wasn’t some quiet guy who let stuff slide. He had a temper, but he held it in check because, as explained by Brooklyn Dodgers owner Branch Rickey (Harrison Ford), the real key to breaking the color barrier will be not fighting back. After all, if Robinson throws a punch, even in self-defense, that will be what spectators will remember, not the incident that led up to that thrown punch.
By the by, given the weird accent and seemingly endless benevolence Ford shows as Rickey, while still maintaining his signature grumpiness, I think I know what Harrison Ford would look like if he played Santa Claus.
But of course, no fighting back means most of Boseman’s best scenes come either early in the movie when he can show a little spirit or later in various dealings with his family. It seemed to me that much of the movie isn’t so much about how Robinson changes the team and eventually all of baseball through anything he does directly but through, well, not acting. Many of Robinson’s white teammates don’t take too kindly to him at first. There are a handful who don’t threaten to quit or request a trade at first, including Robinson’s first manager. Those men all say the same thing: as long as Robinson can help them win games, that’s all that matters.
All that means is Robinson acts less like a man and more like a symbol. His various teammates start to come around by both seeing how good a player he is and seeing just how much abuse he takes. Granted, that’s the point. Robinson takes all kinds of abuse from his own team, other teams, fans, reporters, and anyone else they deal with, and for the most part he just swallows his feelings and puts up with it. Yeah, he loses it when the team is denied a hotel in Philadelphia and a teammate grouses about it, but the audience has seen just how much Robinson has had to deal with all over the place. Robinson’s teammates get their own eye-opening moments, such as when one came to complain to Rickey about a threatening letter and Rickey showed him a file full of said letters directed at Robinson, the one on top threatening to murder Robinson’s young son.
So, while we do see Boseman’s Robinson have a breakdown after some particularly withering racism hurled his way by an opposing team’s manager, he mostly just goes about his business as one-by-one most of his team is won over. Boseman is, as always, a very charismatic lead actor, but I just wish I knew a bit more about what made his Jackie Robinson tick when he mostly just absorbs the abuse and soldiers on.
Still, 42 is a very compelling movie, and I’m certainly glad I saw it.
Grade: B+
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