Chris Beneke
In a famous
photograph of baseball star Jackie Robinson and Brooklyn Dodgers
General Manager Branch Rickey, the African American legend prepares to
sign his 1948 contract. As he does so, the viewer of this staged scene
can make out a small photo hung above Rickey’s
head at top right. From that modest rectangular frame, a young,
beardless Abraham Lincoln gazes upon the scene.*
Three years earlier, Robinson met Rickey under that same gaze and the two men discussed, among many other things, their shared Christian devotion. During this tense and seemingly interminable meeting that would lead to the end of baseball’s longstanding prohibition on black players, Rickey had Robinson read a line from Giovanni Papini’s Life of Christ: “But whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.” Robinson agreed to turn the other cheek and in April 1947, he joined the Dodgers as the first African American major leaguer in more than half a century.
There’s no getting around the fact that the latest retelling of Robinson’s epic first season, Brian Helgeland’s film
42,
succumbs to Hollywood sentimentality. It’s certainly not a great film,
arguably not a good film, and definitely not a subtle one. It aims at a
high-level of verisimilitude and mostly achieves
it, but too often at the expense of dramatic effect and historical
significance. The awkward conflation of events (Dodger scout Clyde
Sukeforth appears to apparate, Harry Potter-style, into a Missouri gas
station where Robinson has just negotiated his way
into a segregated bathroom) and a syrupy musical backdrop (including an
Olympian trumpet fanfare to accompany one of Robinson’s exultant trots
to home plate) will surely disappoint viewers who were lured by the
gritty, thumping Jay-Z-scored
trailer.
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