Capsule Review - 42 (Brian Helgeland)

Chadwick Boseman and Harrison Ford in 42

Jackie Robinson was an extraordinary individual, which is why it's particularly disappointing that 42, the new biopic of baseball's first black player, never aspires to anything more that mediocrity. It's inspiring and certainly well-meaning, but everything is done in such a perfunctory manner, with so few shades of grey, that it's easy to imagine writer-director Brian Helgeland going through a handy list of sports and biographical movie cliches and checking off each new one as he gets to it.

The movie begins with Brooklyn Dodgers owner Branch Rickey's (Harrison Ford) fateful post-WWII decision to integrate the Major Leagues despite the longstanding "gentleman's agreement" barring black ballplayers from participating, and runs like a steam train through the years 1947-49, as Rickey investigates several Negro Leaguers before settling on Jackie Robinson (Chadwick Boseman), who may not have been the single best player available, but was deemed the most marketable and willing to endure the inevitable storm of racism that would greet him. Of course, since we already know that the story ends with Robinson's success, there's very little suspense inherent through the course of the movie. This wouldn't have been as much of a problem had 42 given us a Jackie Robinson that was as interesting or complicated as the real Robinson was (he was a black man who'd eventually campaign with Richard Nixon against JFK, after all), but the film is so earnest and one-note in portraying Robinson as a noble hero in the face of all odds that despite newcomer Chadwick Boseman's strong performance, he's never an interesting enough character for us to invest into beyond surface level.

If anything, by putting a halo on Robinson and showing him as a perfect man, husband, and baseball player, 42 comes off as being unauthentic, not to mention that denying him any flaws makes his real-life struggle seem far too easy.  In the same fashion, the film's streamlined narration doesn't give us enough room to see the nuances that might peek through, and most of the other characters are divided into the camps of "open-minded believer" or "raging racist redneck", with very little in between. As Branch Rickey, Harrison Ford manages to overcome this by essentially going for broke and embracing the melodrama head-on, stomping around with a cigar in his hand and straining his lofty dialogue through tightly clenched teeth, but he's not able to elevate the material surrounding him.

This is longtime Hollywood screenwriter Helgeland's directorial debut, and Ford's performance calls to mind some of the memorable characters from Helgeland's previous screenplays: Kevin Spacey and James Cromwell's corrupt L.A. Confidential cops and Sean Penn's Oscar-winning Boston gangster in Mystic River. Part of the reasons those films worked so well was because they were populated with characters like above and given settings where Helgeland's sometimes-overwrought plots and dialogue could work. We as audiences can watch the sleazy underbelly of 1950's Hollywood in L.A. Confidential and not care that it's a sensationalized version of reality, because it's not expected to be realistic. 42, on the other hand, is entirely based on real-life events, and Helgeland comes across as being too afraid of seeming sensationalistic and possibly offending people, and thus dials Jackie Robinson's character back so much that in the end, there's not enough there to carry a film.

The Most Important Book About Movies I Ever Read

One of the seminal books of my teenage years was atypical compared to most guys my age. It was Roger Ebert's Video Companion 1997, and it was no more different or special than any other collection of Ebert's reviews except that it happened to be given to me for Christmas and was thus my first real look at film criticism. In those long-forgotten days, the Internet was in its infancy; it was still called the World Wide Web, and you dialed up to Prodigy or AOL on your phone line and could wait ten minutes to download one page. The idea that one could one day access within seconds any single one of Ebert's reviews going back over 46 years was still the stuff of science fiction. I don't know if I have that book anymore, back at home in the closet somewhere. I know that I'd read through it so many times that the spine had split somewhere in the "M" section, and it may have been purged out sometime in the past few years.

What I think I remember best about that book is how close I came to throwing it out soon after I got it. Being in my brooding, anti-heroic teenage years, I was convinced that the just-released The Usual Suspects was the greatest film ever made, and eagerly flipped to the "U" section of Ebert's book to read his review. To my horror, Ebert trashed the film with a one-and-a-half star rating and declared the famous twist ending to be pointless and trite, invalidating everything that had come before it. Why, this supposed "film critic" was nothing but a pompous fraud! How dare he not agree with me and the majority of other critics that had praised the film? I don't think I completely forgave Ebert until the summer of 1999, when I saw a massively-praised film called The Sixth Sense, and immediately declared that the soon-to-be famous twist ending was pointless and trite, invalidating everything that had come before it. Of course, I still disagree entirely with him when it comes to The Usual Suspects.

But then again, Ebert had always been an enemy of teenage boys, or at least the teenage boy mindset.  My very first experience with him came when I happened to see an episode of Siskel & Ebert as a preteen in the early 1990's, and was shocked as they gave two thumbs down to everything, including two films that I believed were sure to be classics: Robin Hood: Men in Tights, and So I Married an Axe Murderer. The only film that they gave thumbs up to that episode was Searching for Bobby Fischer, some film about chess that I'd never even heard of. Clearly, these snobby elitist critics were out to hate on everything that was popular and good, while giving praise to boring dramas and movies from other countries that didn't even have the decency to be made in English.

But as the nineties went on and I saw more and more movies, and eventually began staying up until midnight on Sundays in order to catch Siskel & Ebert, I found myself wanting to read more and more of Ebert's reviews, and eventually came to see just why this fat guy from Chicago who'd once dated Oprah Winfrey was the guy we were supposed to listen to when it came to movies. It wasn't by accident, of that I can assure you. Roger Ebert had come to prominence in the late 1960's, and in 1975 became the first film critic to win a Pulitzer Prize. Throughout his career, he managed to be the one critic who set the standard for the industry, both through his writing style and his general taste in film.

Ebert was, of course, far more mainstream than most gave him credit for. In fact, one of my chief criticisms of him over the past decade or so is that he had begun giving out four-star reviews like candy. But even before then, Ebert had broken so much ground in the film industry, offering a more populist version of the legendary Pauline Kael. He could be acerbic and take down a movie with the best of them, but he would (usually) save the venom for those films which we all agreed were terrible. And unlike Kael, he would find greatness in both the multiplex and the art-house theater. He was the critic who in 1994 could give four-star reviews to both Forrest Gump and Pulp Fiction, and not because he felt any need to toe the line and give all sides of the public what they wanted to hear, but because he truly found them to be equally triumphant (if structurally opposite) examples of great films.

And reading his book as a teen helped me realize, for example, that yes, one could differentiate between straight up dumb comedy (like, say, Robin Hood: Men in Tights), and dumb comedy that was made with smarts (The Naked Gun, for example). It was through his book that I first got to actually read about something like Krzysztof Kieslowski's Three Colors Trilogy, and how even if I, like most 16-year-old kids, hadn't actually seen those "obscure foreign movies by directors with unpronounceable names", I could recognize why people considered them great cinema. Ebert did not create my taste in film, but I'd be lying if I said he didn't influence it, because it was through that massive book with hundreds of reviews that my views on film matured from those of the typical teenager to the (slightly) more intelligent and experienced adult I am today.

Ebert's style, consciously or unconsciously, influenced an entire generation of writers and critics, and not just when it came to the movies. In each review, he'd simply start talking about each film in a conversational style, and see where that led him. Sometimes, he went deep into technical aspects or historical details. Sometimes he delved into thematic and philosophical arguments about the film, or go off on political tangents. Often, he'd just describe the film in such a way that you'd be able to guess even without seeing it whether you'd like it or not. He had the ability to dictate his beliefs and opinions in such ways that they seemed impossible to argue, even if you completely disagreed. I mean, I still can't tell him precisely why his review of The Usual Suspects was so far off the mark. And of course, there was a reason that his caustic reviews and takedowns of terrible films were usually his most popular. Ebert was one of the few who'd invented snark before snark was cool. My favorite all-time article of his was such a review: that of a long-forgotten (and awful) mid-nineties Sylvester Stallone film called Assassins. Ebert's opening paragraph in that review ended up being my go-to line in countless arguments over the past 15 years, since it summed up what was wrong with so many bad films so neatly:

"Believe me, I know how to believe stuff when it happens in the movies. I believe bicycles can fly. I believe sharks can eat boats. I even believe pigs can talk. But I do not believe "Assassins," because this movie is filled with such preposterous impossibilities that Forrest Gump could have improved it with a quick rewrite."

As I'd mentioned earlier, I'd come to rely on Ebert's voice less so over the past decade, as I felt he'd become more lax as a critic since his first bout with cancer in 2003, making factual errors and giving glowing reviews to too many films that didn't deserve them. But his presence still shone as bright as ever, both through his thousands of past reviews and his work outside of movie reviews, the many articles and blogs he'd written that expounded on film, art, and life in general. And if he'd become more forgiving to bad movies over the last few years, well, I figure he'd earned that right. He'd seen more than enough of them in the decades prior.