MOVIE REVIEW - 42

We are certainly due for that really nice movie comes out and seems to usher in some of the really good movies that will be on the way.   This year that movie is 42.

42 is the true story of the breaking of the color barrier in Major League Baseball in 1947 with the emergence of Jackie Robinson who was the player, and Branch Rickey who made it happen.  42 takes place between 1945, when Rickey, the Brooklyn Dodgers boss decided he was going to integrate baseball, and 1947 when Robinson took the field.  Changing baseball, and everything else forever in American culture racially. 

To it's credit, this is far more than just Robinson's journey, it is the story of two men.  Very different in about every way, except for their love of baseball.  Robinson, a star athlete in college at UCLA, then a standout player in the old Negro Leagues in baseball.  Rickey, an older man, with the love of the game and it's future.  42 makes no bones about it that part of Rickey's motivation was money in integrating the Dodgers, but there is much more to the story.  And that is the strength of this movie. Why would Rickey take this enormous gamble?

As great as it is to see the Robinson saga play out skillfully on screen here, it is really great to see Rickey's story finally told.  Be it only a very small slice of who he really was as a man and his countless and amazing contributions to professional baseball.  He is not overly well known, but he is a baseball immortal, to be spoken in the same breath as Ruth, Gehrig, Cobb, Wagner, Mathewson, Mack and Johnson.   Much of what we enjoy in MLB today can we take for granted, but Rickey was responsible for it.  But the Robinson achievement is his crowning jewel. 

Ricky and Robinson were both extraordinary men.  This is chronicled very well here. Rickey knowing that not only did you have to have the right player, but the right guy.  And Robinson was the right guy. Overcoming amazingly powerful bigotry and prejudice was tough stuff in the country in the 1940's. 

Chadwick Boseman is Robinson and is very well cast as his likeness to Jackie is amazing. And he looks very comfortable in the baseball scenes here, and there are many.  He gives a very nice performance bringing Robinson to life.   But to me, Harrison Ford as Rickey is nothing short of terrific. 

I think this is his best career performance to date.   Before you climb all over me about the Indiana Jones flicks, they are two very different things.  Jones was brought to life in the movies as an action hero, with all the bells and toys.  And he is great in those flicks.  This is a very different thing.  Ford brings Rickey to life as an accomplished actor, doing real acting.  Becoming him, with only his craft in hand.  Ford is blessed with a well written script and is also blessed playing character that is amazingly complex, and interesting, and one that  most don't know. He is sensational

42. Very good movie, great script, and a story that should be told and told well.  Ford = terrific.