42 (2013)

Brian Helgeland's 42 arrives with the solemnity of a monument and the pacing of a well-kept box score. It concerns Jackie Robinson's passage from the Kansas City Monarchs to the Brooklyn Dodgers between 1945 and 1947, and it treats that passage as a civic event. Chadwick Boseman plays Robinson with a coiled stillness, and the supporting cast is populated largely by Black performers of real presence: Nicole Beharie as Rachel, André Holland as the chronicler Wendell Smith. A major studio, in 2013, handed a substantial budget to a predominantly Black ensemble and let them carry the picture. That is an industrial fact, and it registers.

The film's cultural awareness is not incidental. It is the engine. Segregation is dramatized in dugouts and dining rooms, at the gas station where Robinson is refused service before he has thrown a pitch. Ben Chapman's taunting is rendered at length, the slurs unsoftened, and the camera declines to look away from the cost of restraint. Pee Wee Reese's arm over Robinson's shoulder lands as the intended sacrament. The color line is the subject, and the film knows it.

Where the picture settles into comfort is its sermonizing. Branch Rickey, played by Harrison Ford behind prosthetics and a fat suit, delivers speeches about courage and profit with the same unblinking gravity, and the film treats his business instincts as moral heroism. No such ambivalence troubles the rest of the frame. There is no feminist argument here, no queer presence, no environmental conscience, no critique of the money that built the ballpark. Just a good man, a great wrong, and a jersey number retired in perpetuity.

The result is earnest, well-mounted, and entirely conventional in its virtues. We have seen this shape before, and we will see it again, and we will dutifully record it as what it is: a history lesson delivered in a comfortable chair, with peanuts.

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