42 (2013, dir. Brian Helgeland) ***.5/****

    Of Major League Baseball movies, "42" stands as one of the best of the bunch.  Only "The Natural" stands out in my mind as a baseball movie that delivers the goods in terms of lifelike and compelling baseball game situations and larger than life scenes in the life of a great player.  This gripping tale of the first season of the first black man in the majors, Jackie Robinson, is filled with intense baseball action and high drama off the field.   It vividly depicts the awful racism that accompanied Robinson's initiation into the majors after playing in the segregated Negro League and how he had the courage to hold his ground even when the taunting and provocation from fans, opposing players, and teammates reached a boiling point.
   Chadwick Boseman plays Jackie in a performance that captures the conflicted, overwhelming pressure that the player experienced.  You get the sense that you are actually witnessing history on the screen - Boseman's Robinson is a man of integrity, determination, and moral strength.  Harrison Ford plays Branch Rickey of the Brooklyn Dodgers Baseball Club who recruits Robinson in a daring attempt to bring the first black man into the majors.  Ford's performance is great as well - he really creates a memorable character in Rickey - a drawling, cantankerous, hard-nosed old man with an open-minded and against-the-grain attitude.
   Helgeland's direction of the baseball action is dead-on.  The action is realistic and never fails to convince the viewer that this is the majors.  There are many memorable moments on the field and we are not only given the good moments of Robinson's first season but some of his struggles at the plate as well.
   This is a good, old-fashioned biopic in the Hollywood tradition.  There are no stylistic quirks or deviations from norms of filmic biography but it does a great job in creating a majestic story of a time when the colour barrier was broken in baseball.  It stands as a testament to the strength and dignity of mankind in the face of adversity and as a microcosm for the ordeal of the black man in 20th century America.