text: The Problem With Saints On the lifeless Jackie Robinson biopic 42. Plus, Danny Boyle's twisty Trance. By Wesley Morris on April 11, 2013 
   
   Whenever it is that an icon passes from being human to being a saint is the point at which it's probably too late for a good movie. All you get is the lessons learned and very little of the naturalism or idiosyncrasy or personality that made the person iconic in the first place. Or you get all that courtesy of a great performance, but then there's no filmmaking or storytelling to support it. You rarely get both acting and an angle, the way you did, say, with Walk the Line and Lincoln. It's usually that the subjects mean so much to the filmmakers that they can't bring themselves to take the subjects out of their historical packaging and play with them, lest they lose their value. 
   
   That's the Jackie Robinson situation. In 1950, Robinson played himself in The Jackie Robinson Story, which was basically a hero giving a feel-good book report on himself. He's been in bubble wrap ever since. But after turning down other movies, including one Spike Lee and Denzel Washington wanted to make, Robinson's widow, Rachel, finally said yes. So 66 years after Robinson became the first black major league baseball player, here we are with 42, which has been made with such reverence for Robinson's importance that Robinson is barely there. 
   
   Brian Helgeland (Payback, A Knight's Tale) wrote and directed this movie, which concentrates on Robinson's debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers, and sometime after the halfway point he lays out his angle. It's Robinson's (Chadwick Boseman) first season with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947, and for each at-bat against the Phillies, Philadelphia manager Ben Chapman (Alan Tudyk) leaves the dugout and proceeds to call him "n----- " the way you'd call your dog into the house. It's a good scene that goes on long enough to leave a simmer in your blood. And after he pops up during his next-to-last at-bat, with Chapman still going, Robinson leaves the plate, steps down into the tunnel beside the dugout, howls out his rage, smashes a bat, and crumples to the ground. 
   
   While he's crumpled, Branch Rickey (Harrison Ford), the Dodgers general manager who hired Robinson, appears and proceeds to explain that his controversial hire can't get mad since that's what the bigots expect. There's too much riding on his player for him to run out of cheeks to turn. (But Robinson already knows this. In one of his first scenes, he calmly but tensely threatens to go elsewhere for gas after the white service station manager refuses to let him use the bathroom.) Rickey's pep talk puts Robinson in the movie's thematic place. His function is only curative: "You're medicine, Jackie." 
   
   42 is a Hollywood movie about American racism in which the objects of that racism must summon their most noble selves. Helgeland, who's white, doesn't imagine how it must have felt being slurred as relentlessly as Robinson was. So Robinson serves as a lesson not in triumph, but in tolerance. This is the sort of movie in which Jackie and Rachel Robinson (Nicole Beharie) don't have to change. White America does. That's great for messaging, but hell on drama. 
   
   All the changing here happens to the players and the management of the Dodgers organization. Helgeland skillfully writes around the problem of how white racism affects non-racist whites. And he's a smart, sensitive-enough writer to make this an interesting, worthy emotional pursuit. The players draft an anti-Robinson petition not long after his arrival, and one by one find themselves changing their minds. Robinson was never a problem for Pee Wee Reese, whom Lucas Black plays, but when the Dodgers wind up in Cincinnati, he shows Rickey a threatening letter someone wrote him and worries that his relatives in Kentucky will go bananas. Then Rickey shows Reese the pounds of hate mail that Robinson gets, Reese goes out on the field, puts his arm around his teammate, and lets the crowd savor the image. Having an actor play Robinson makes sense for realism, but most of the time a piece of cardboard with Robinson's likeness would have done the trick. 
   
   Boseman has very little to do that makes Robinson a character. His best scenes are usually somewhere on the baseball field. The challenge in them for an actor is to find a way to combine Robinson's athleticism with his joy at being an athlete. He puts some cocky comedy into his base stealing and a little bit of sex into the performance. Beharie is a strong, charismatic actor who needs a great role. (Here she's playing a great woman, and that's not the same thing.) Most of the other black characters, like the sports reporter Wendell Smith (Andre Holland), have nothing to them but their goodness. Smith is turned into a glorified butler for Robinson. And there's an embarrassing couple of scenes with a precious tyke who, we're told during the closing credits, will grow up to be Ed Charles, who played for the Mets and Athletics. He explains plays for his mother, but is played by the kind of child actor who gives you cavities. 
   
   Most of the funny and insightful stuff falls to actors like Christopher Meloni, T.R. Knight, Hamish Linklater, Max Gail, and even Tudyk. Ford, meanwhile, turns jowly and growly to play Rickey. He doesn't have the suffocating hardship of upholding a legacy because Helgeland has given him all the self-congratulatory stuff to play. Ford can get high and mighty with all the grandstanding he gets to do because Rickey here is right. He's shamelessly entertaining in chewing everybody out and cheering everybody up. But by lifting up Ford and Rickey, the movie makes Robinson beside the point. 
   
   It's possible that Helgeland is thinking past the matter of racism altogether. A lot of 42 feels like an allegory for how things might go for that first openly gay guy in a major league locker room — all the awkwardness about showering together and sharing rooms, the complaints about not wanting to play with someone who's deemed different, the way that after a season of prolonged exposure everyone's tune changes and the outcast is embraced. But whether Helgeland is thinking about Jackie Robinson or his to-be-determined gay counterpart, 42 ultimately doesn't feel like a sports drama as much as it does an epic commencement speech. 
   
   
   
   Fox Searchlight 
   
   One reason to love Danny Boyle is that we'll never have to put up with a Jackie Robinson movie from him. Or if it comes to that, he'll find an imaginative reason to do it. Last summer, he had James Bond throw Queen Elizabeth out of a helicopter to open the Olympics. He gets off on his irreverence. 
   
   Trance is high-order, film noir nonsense that takes Boyle back to the thrillers he made at the start of his career with John Hodge (he wrote Trance, too), like Shallow Grave and Trainspotting, that were preoccupied with the grimy corners of the psyche. Boyle's no longer a grimy filmmaker. He likes sleek, icy images that seem launched from cannons and slingshots or pushed through syringes. 
   
   Trance concerns an auction-house art heist that goes south when the job's inside man, an auctioneer named Simon (James McAvoy), takes a shot to the head that erases his memory of where he put the Goya painting he helped steal. The ringleader is a guy named Franck (Vincent Cassel), one of those elegant thugs who surrounds himself with a trio of goons that do the bone-breaking while he sips cognac or whatever. When it's clear that Simon suffers from honest-to-goodness amnesia, Franck lets him select a hypnotist to help him retrieve the memory. 
   
   You suspect the movie's up to no good because Rosario Dawson plays the shrink Simon picks. There's no reason to ask us to believe Dawson as a medical professional unless she can turn that belief on its head. Eventually, this woman talks her way into Franck's criminal circle. She argues that Simon doesn't feel safe remembering where he's put the painting because he knows Franck and his friends will just kill him when he does. What ensues is group hypnosis, some sex, and two or three changeups that don't twist the plot so much as reroute and rewire the movie. 
   
   This is Boyle's first movie set entirely in London since 2003's 28 Days Later , and his affinity for affixing his camera to everything speaks to the city's reliance on closed-circuit surveillance. He's working with the editor Jon Harris and his usual cinematographer, Anthony Dod Mantle, and they give the movie the exhilarating attention-deficit disorientation that Boyle has turned into a legible cinematic language. Symmetrical reflections in glass that turn into a living Rorschach, a hypnosis head trip that requires use of an iPad to extend the trip, the vaginal lattice of a highway overpass at night: His eye is manic without ever descending into madness. 
   
   Besides, the script, which Hodge wrote with the science fiction TV writer Joe Ahearne, goes crazy enough. At some point, you don't know whom to trust or what's real or why anybody is doing what they're doing, but McAvoy, Dawson, and Cassel work well together. Dawson is required to put her nude body to incoherent if not gratuitous use, but she's also perfectly plausible when discussing the rare psychological state of extreme suggestibility. Even after the movie has gone off the deep end and into a moral pit, you're not sure whether it makes any sense. By then, Boyle has fried enough of our senses that Simon's extreme suggestibility is contagious. ||||| I was 9 years old, and having dinner with my family at the famous Manero's steakhouse in Connecticut ("Try our garlic bread!") when a black man across the room caught my grandfather's attention. 
   
   "Get that gentleman's autograph," said the hard-faced Dubliner, who was never impressed by anyone. 
   
   My father nodded agreement. My mother quickly dug a pen and notepad out of a purse full of Saltines and tissues. I went over obediently and asked and the grey-haired man politely signed. 
   
   "Jackie Robinson," he wrote. 
   
   I didn't know why my family was so excited when I came back to the table. But then I wasn't a baseball fan, and civil rights wasn't part of the core curriculum at Our Lady of Perpetual Help. The name didn't mean much to me. 
   
   It should have. It should mean something to everyone. And "42," a new but very old-fashioned movie, tells us why. 
   
   How Jackie Robinson — backed by Brooklyn Dodgers chief Branch Rickey — single-handedly broke the color barrier. How — years before buses and schools followed suit — he integrated the most American place of all: The baseball diamond. 
   
   It is no exaggeration to say Jackie Robinson made his country a better place. And he did it the way Gandhi did, and the way Martin Luther King would — by simply being better than the people who hated him. 
   
   "42" is a bit obvious, lunkily plotted and with starkly drawn characters. "Like a TV movie," I heard Chris Rock grumble as he left the screening — and yes, it would have been interesting to see what his friend Spike Lee would have done with this material. 
   
   But Lee, who tried for years to get this project going, wanted to do it as an epic; what the studios wanted (and Brian Helgeland has brought to the screen) is a concentrated story, almost exclusively devoted to Robinson's first season in the majors. 
   
   That means, naturally, missing some great details. 
   
   Like Robinson's amazing college career, where he lettered in four sports at UCLA (and played on the same football team as the great Woody Strode). Or his military career, in which the young officer was court-martialed (but exonerated) when he refused to move to the back of a bus. 
   
   But that's alright, because there's more than enough here — both in Rickey's faith in Robinson, and Robinson's belief in himself. 
   
   Those words have deeper meaning here, too. Rickey was a devout, Bible-quoting Christian who took comfort in the fact that his new player was a fellow Methodist; the only way to survive this first season, Rickey knew, was if Robinson turned the other cheek. 
   
   He just didn't realize how often he would have to turn it. 
   
   Rickey is played by Harrison Ford, with a padded gut and a pair of eyebrow weaves; it is the first time in years I have seen Ford have fun onscreen. He growls, he yells, he runs the gamut; he delights in being an actor again, and not just a star. (And let's get premature: A supporting Oscar nomination? Very possibly.) 
   
   And Chadwick Boseman is perfect as Robinson. It's not just that he looks like the legend (and moves like an athlete); it's that he captures, in a clenched jaw or a sidelong glance, a lifetime's worth of dearly attained dignity and barely contained rage. 
   
   As for the movie itself — well, again, it really would have been interesting to see Lee's take. Because Helgeland's approach, while not as stuffily stylized as the caught-in-amber "The Natural," is full of overbearing music and thick with Hollywood cliches — not least among them, the tendency to tell a black man's story through a white man's eyes. 
   
   But that doesn't mean it won't make you feel good. And it doesn't mean it isn't important to see. 
   
   As for my Jackie Robinson autograph, it disappeared — until, years later, I found it again in a mildewed box. Creased and slightly stained, it's framed now, under a still of the Dodger stealing home. It hangs in my son's room. And although I didn't know why this man was a hero, he does. 
   
   Everyone should. 
   
   Ratings note: The film contains strongly racist language, and some violence. 
   
   '42' (PG-13) Warner Bros.(128 min.) 
   
   Directed by Brian Helgeland. With Chadwick Boseman, Harrison Ford. Now playing in New Jersey. 
   
   ★ ★ ★ 
   
  
target: – The Jackie Robinson biopic 42 slides into theaters today, and it's being greeted by a polite ovation from critics, who for the most part seem to admire Robinson's story more than the filmmaking. Here's what people are saying: If director Brian Helgeland's "intention was to tell Jackie's story in a linear, paint-by-numbers fashion, he has achieved that goal," writes James Berardinelli at ReelViews. "The film takes no chances and does nothing bold." Still, he gives it a decent score, saying it's "a worthwhile sports movie" that "evokes powerful emotions" thanks to its compelling story. AO Scott at the New York Times has a more charitable take, writing that Helgeland "has honorably sacrificed the chance to make a great movie in the interest of making one that is accessible and inspiring." The film is pure hero-worship. "It is blunt, simple, and sentimental, using time-tested methods to teach a clear and rousing lesson." In the process, it gives younger viewers an unflinching look at the ugly "world their grandparents were born into." "Chadwick Boseman is perfect as Robinson," gushes Stephen Whitty at the Star-Ledger. "He captures, in a clenched jaw or a sidelong glance, a lifetime's worth of dearly attained dignity." Harrison Ford, meanwhile, might get a supporting actor nod; "it is the first time in years I have seen Ford have fun onscreen." Sure, the movie is "thick with Hollywood cliches … but that doesn't mean it won't make you feel good." Wesley Morris at Grantland complains that the movie is a little too reverential. Robinson doesn't have to change, "White America does. That's great for messaging, but hell on drama." It's the white characters who evolve, not the saint wearing 42. "Having an actor play Robinson makes sense for realism, but most of the time a piece of cardboard with Robinson's likeness would have done the trick."