This is considerably better than I'd expected, largely due to the performance of Andre Braugher and the script by L. Travis Clark and Steve Duncan. It could so easily have gone awry -- a generic tale of the flawless Robinson focusing on his love life and giving him abundant opportunities to make speeches about how all men are created equal. It doesn't do that. The script allows him one brief speech about his pride. His troubled engagement to Kasi Lemmons is the B story, touched upon lightly, and revealing Robinson to be almost as susceptible to stereotypes as anyone else.
It's informative too. I never followed baseball much after entering adolescence but of course I'd heard of Jackie Robinson, Pee Wee Reese, and Leo Durocher. Where I lived, just outside New York, opinions were always binary. You either supported the Yankees or the Dodgers. In any case, I never knew Robinson was in the army, let alone an officer and a gentleman by act of Congress. And of course I didn't know he'd been subjected to a general court martial, which is as ominous as it gets. I myself was never subjected to more than a captain's mast. Three times, true, but a much lower order of punishment.
The story covers the years between Robinson's college days as an all-star athlete at UCLA to his resignation from the army and the point at which he is invited to join the Brooklyn Dodgers as the first African-American to play major league baseball. Braugher is just fine as Robinson. He's an inventive and subtle actor and pretty much dominates the screen. But his character, though put upon, is hardly pure. He loses his temper too easily an shouts when he should just shut up. Alas, Stan Shaw is "Joe Louis" but only in quotes. Dale Dye gives the role his usual sense of determination. Some of the lesser roles are poorly cast. The "bad guys" look like "bad guys" -- ugly and smirking as they debase Robinson, his rank, and his race. That's the director's responsibility and Larry Peerce flubs it because it would have been a more challenging story if the bad guys had looked ordinary and acted slowly and politely as good old boys do, even when they're tearing out your pyloric sphincter.
On the whole, Peerce at times almost seems intent on torpedoing the story's real drama by turning it into a comic book version. The last shot (in slow motion) has Robinson mounting the stairs to play a game just before leaving for the major leagues. With the camera located at the bottom of the stairs, peering upward at him, Robinson is allowed to position himself so that the sun is behind his figure, creating a halo with backlighting, and then removing his cap and pointing it outward towards nothing in particular except being the bringer of desegregation to the major leagues and heroic status to himself. It's a minor insult to the viewer, whose sensibilities can't be trusted to figure out the future without a cinematic A-B-C lesson.
There's another point that I feel needs to be made, but I'll have to slip out of this PC straight jacket to make it. At Camp Hood (now Fort Hood) the segregation on the base is such that white and "colored" officers have separate clubs. African-Americans have been victims of this racist nonsense for more than two hundred years and now that officers' club for "coloreds" only has become its own fort, to which whites may be no more than tolerated. It must be difficult for younger people to know how painful legal segregation was and how destructive racism itself was to civility.
I'll give an example. I'm on a Greyhound bus traveling through Texas. Seated next to me is a young Southern white woman holding a toddler on her lap. In the seats in front of us are two swarthy young men, college students from India. I am chatting amiably with them. One of them remarks on how handsome the toddler is, reaches over and pats the toddler gently on the cheek. And a baleful glare clouds the face of the white woman. Suddenly her pretty features are full of hatred. The two Indian men, unaware of regional customs, don't get the message and cheerfully continue with their chat.
That's what Jackie Robinson would have faced at the door of the whites-only officer's club at Fort Hood. Unfortunately, the blacks-only officer's club barely tolerates whites today and the community is infused with an "us" versus "them" feeling. Slavery and hundreds of years of devalued status can do that to a group. I'll give an example. My mother worked in a factory and her best friend was an African-American woman of a similar age. They had a warm relationship until the friend abruptly began to avoid my mother.
After some weeks of non-person treatment, my mother too her friend aside and asked what had gone wrong. Was it something she'd said? It wasn't that, said the friend. It was that she'd been chastised by her other friends and by her family for forming a friendship with a white person. The friendship continued until my mother's death, but only over the phone or in secret meetings. If that segregated officers' club at Fort Hood still existed, it would now be surrounded by barbed wire to keep whites out.
The movie is rich with implications for the future, some having to do with more than just baseball, whether the director realizes it or not.
