The entire life of Jackie Robinson is a rich subject for a film adaptation, not that this would be obvious after viewing 42, Brian Helgeland’s fourth feature film. The youngest of five, Robinson was born into a family of sharecroppers in 1919. As a youth, he was a gang member (briefly), an accomplished track runner, football, tennis and baseball player, as well as a military man. (He was a member of the 761st “Black Panthers” Tank Battalion.) Robinson often spoke out against racism and suffered as a result. Long before Rosa Parks sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott, Robinson was courtmartialed for refusing to move to the back of a military bus. He did all this before becoming the first African American to play in major league baseball at age twenty-eight. All this can be learned from Robinson’s Wikipedia page, but not from 42, despite the film’s ostensible status as the icon’s biopic.
As a result, as a story about the life of Jackie Robinson, 42 is an utter disappointment. Yet as a portrait of segregated, post-war America, 42 serves its purpose (a purpose very different from that of a biopic), and if viewed primarily as a baseball movie, Helgeland’s film becomes a wholly enjoyable and thrilling experience, perhaps even a triumph.
42 focuses on two legends in American baseball—Branch Rickey (played by an appropriately theatrical Harrison Ford), the executive of Major League Baseball who first integrated the sport, and Jackie Robinson (Chadwick Boseman) who became the first black to play in the majors when he signed to the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947. The plot of 42 follows Robinson’s transition from the Negro Leagues to the Minor Leagues, and then to the Dodgers (and its effect on baseball and the whole of America).
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