Video review: "42"

Saccharine and starry-eyed, "42" places Jackie Robinson on a pedestal and peers in awe at the baseball icon. Writer/director Brian Helgeland's biopic of the first African-American to play major league baseball tries and largely succeeds to get at the real man behind the myth. But it also ladles on the hagiography in portions too huge to choke down comfortably.

Chadwick Boseman aptly plays Robinson, one of the top players in the Negro League who was carefully selected to integrate baseball. Branch Rickey, the legendary general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers, knew he needed a player who could not only hit and field, but also accept the slings and arrows of white society without showing any public protest.

The result was a trying rookie year for Robinson and his wife (Nicole Beharie) as he endured racial taunts and threats from fans, opposing teams and even his own dugout.

Helgeland takes us behind the scenes to show us what the constant assault on his dignity cost Robinson -- in one crackling scene, serenely accepting the racial epithets hurled at him by an opposing manager, then shattering his bat in frustration off the field.

Harrison Ford is excellent as Rickey, a crotchety wheeler-dealer with a secret sentimentality he labors hard to conceal. At first the performance seems cartoony and over-the-top. But Ford slyly shows us how Rickey used his outsized personality and kitschy mannerisms as a prop to get his way.

The movie's best moments are in exploring the relationship between baseball player and boss, the traditional power dynamic swaying and crumbling as the men development genuine respect and affection for each other.

"42" may too often indulge in hero worship instead of character development. But there's no denying this film packs a humdinger of a wallop.

Extra features are rather disappointing. The DVD edition comes only with a single featurette, "Stepping into History," about the integration of baseball. Upgrading to the Blu-ray version adds two more mini-documentaries: "Full-Contact Baseball" and "The Legacy of the Number 42."

For a movie that hits a solid double dramatically, it's a shame they saw fit to bunt on the video goodies.

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Review: "42"

The Jackie Robinson biopic, "42," is a worthwhile film, but it could have been a much better one.

Writer/director Brian Helgeland goes straight for starry-eyed hagiography in the story of the first black player to integrate major league baseball. Although it strives to show a complete picture of an icon, it still puts him on a pedestal so high the audience sometimes has trouble glimpsing the real man.

The movie is effective in showing the behind-the-scenes struggle endured by Robinson during his first year with the Brooklyn Dodgers, and especially in his relationship with Branch Rickey, the gutsy general manager who broke the color barrier by drafting Robinson.

I just wish Helgeland could have been a little more restrained in his idol worship. At nearly ever turn, his film takes a double-dip into gooey sentiment ... and then it spoons up some more.

Chadwick Boseman and Harrison Ford are a good pairing as Robinson and Rickey. Boseman is a decent physical match for Robinson, and his steel glare and clenched jaw muscles cue us in to how the player struggled to shrug off the taunts and insults he endured from fans, opposing players and even his own teammates.

As everyone knew, if Robinson responded to the provocations with anything more than quiet resolve, he would be blamed for the incident and the cause of integration set back for years. Helgeland and Boseman show us Robinson's on-the-field heroics, then take us back behind the dugout to show him splintering his bat against the wall in frustration.

Alan Tudyk has a terrific small part as a racist opposing manager who strides out onto the field every time Robinson comes up to bat to hurl a constant stream of vile epithets. Tudyk is pitch-perfect in representing  the Jim Crow mentality, where white people thought it was their God-given right to put "coloreds" in their place.

Ford is very good in his first "old man" role. Yes, I know he played "old Indy" in the last Indiana Jones film, but that's not really the same thing -- he was still portraying a vibrant man defined by his physicality and manly confidence. Here he's playing a 66-year-old (that's actually five years younger than Ford himself) who is stooped and bent, his jowls working furiously underneath caterpillar eyebrows.

It's a patriarchal role, and Ford subsumes his superman persona completely. At first we think the performance is all exterior -- the way he worries his cigar, speaks with a distinctive accent and furrows his brow at young whippersnappers. But Ford goes deeper in later scenes, revealing a man deeply bothered about the way the sport he loves divides players unnecessarily, and determined to do something about it before his own time is up.

At first Rickey insists to anyone that asks that bringing in Robinson is simply a smart move, both in terms of baseball and business. Robinson is a terrific young player with a great future ahead of him, and more black people would be apt to buy tickets.

"Dollars ain't black and white," he teases. "They're green. Every dollar's green."

But in the end the relationship between manager and player becomes much more.

The script is filled with plenty of clunky, corny dialogue. "God designed me to last," Robinson intones during a low moment. His adoring wife Ray (Nicole Beharie) has little to do but smile fetchingly from the stands and spout her own tin-ear invocations: "Please God, let him be seen for what he can do."

The good definitely outweighs the bad in "42," and anyone who's a fan of baseball or history will likely be highly engrossed by this tale. I just wish this Cracker Jack of a movie had dialed down the sugar.

Review: "Promised land"

“Promised Land” is the sort of movie that is so gratingly earnest, so righteous in its mission and so unwavering in its message that it undercuts the storytelling.

This drama about the issue of hydraulic fracturing drilling for natural gas, or “fracking,” contains some powerful moments and a few nice performances, particularly Matt Damon as a conflicted gas company rep. But the screenplay, co-written by Damon and John Krasinski (who also co-stars), sets up the conflict in such stark shades of black and white, we know exactly how the characters’ journeys will turn out.

To wit: I do not think I am giving anything away by stating that this film ends with Damon’s character, Steve Butler, undergoing a major change of heart, making a big speech in front of the townspeople in which he confesses his sins. This is because, given everything that has transpired, this movie could not have ended any other way.

Steve is the hotshot top salesman for Global Gas. His job is to go into rural communities where natural gas is lying in beds of shale rock deep below the earth and buy up the leasing rights to farms. Steve, along with his partner Sue Thomason (Frances McDormand), have a track record of signing more land at a fraction of the price compared to other teams.

Now he’s up for a big promotion, as soon as he closes the deal on the tiny town of Miller Falls. There he encounters a stubborn old farmer (Hal Holbrook) who used to be a big shot scientist. He warns people about the environmental dangers of fracking, and convinces them to hold an election in three weeks’ time to decide the issue.

This represents a nightmare scenario for Steve and Sue, who are used to descending on a small community, swooping up all the lease contracts and getting out before any opposition has time to coalesce. Even worse, a smarmy young environmentalist from some group called Superior Athena named Dustin Noble (Krasinski) shows up with dire warnings and horrifying photographs of dead cows after his family’s dairy farm was ruined by fracking.

The contrast between Dustin and Steve could not be more puzzling. For a fellow who is supposed to be the best there is at schmoozing and selling, Steve seems absolutely flummoxed by the tall, blithely charming environmentalist. As a result, the farmers keep getting sullener, transitioning from get-off-my-land rebuffs to fisticuffs in bars.

“I’m not a bad guy,” he keeps telling people, until you suspect it’s not them he’s trying to convince.

Damon gives one of his best performances as a guy who’s plowed all of his energy into his job at the detriment of nourishing his soul. Steve came from a small town himself that was devastated by layoffs at the local Caterpillar factory, and was one of only two people in his high school who went to college.

Now he’s successful, and goes around the country writing big checks to dirt-poor farmers who he genuinely believes he’s helping. There’s a sense of altruism there, but also contempt.

Steve sees these fracking contracts as their one chance to cash in and get ahead. He can’t believe it when people turn him down. They’re just perpetuating a “delusional self-mythology” about rural America, he says.

Steve made it out, and thinks everyone else wants to, too.

This dynamic would have worked better if the movie’s internal logic wasn’t all bunched up in knots. For example, we keep getting reminders of how big Global Gas is – “We’re a $9 billion company!” is the phrase that’s repeated several times. Yet they seem to have the resources of a mom-and-pop.

As near as we can figure, Steve and Sue in their beaten-up rental truck and recently store-bought flannels – deliberately downscale accoutrements meant to help them blend in – represent Global’s entire presence. At one point, Steve gets the idea to hold a town fair to generate goodwill, and he has to set up all the tents, hay bales and fencing himself. Huh?

Director Gus Van Sant has a nice eye for the beautiful landscapes depicted – the film was shot lovingly by cinematographer Linus Sandgren outside of Pittsburgh. But his pacing is a little off at times, and characters disappear for long stretches or behave erratically.

For instance, the (inevitable) local love interest is played by Rosemarie DeWitt. Alice, a winsome schoolteacher brushing up against spinsterhood, shares immediate sparks with Steve, then starts flirting around with Dustin. As written, the character seems to have no motivations or opinions about fracking, as long as she’s got two gorgeous guys squabbling over her.

“Promised Land” may have its heart in the right place, but too often it sacrifices believability.

2.5 stars out of four

Review: "Get Low"

"I built myself a jail and put myself in it for 40 years," is how renowned hermit Felix Bush describes his self-imposed exile. Now grown old and feeling Death's hand tightening its grip, he wants one last furlough so he can throw himself a huge funeral, with himself as the (living) guest of honor, before it's time to "get low."

In olden days -- or at least the cinematic reflection of them -- every town had someone like Bush: He's far more spoken about than spoken to, with dark stories of his deeds building upon each other, one generation to the next.

We'd call them outcasts, except hermits like Bush have removed themselves from society voluntarily. Absent any concrete reason for shunning them, people create their own, until the truth is buried under a slow avalanche of whispers.

Robert Duvall got his start in movies nearly a half-century ago playing one such recluse, Boo Radley in "To Kill a Mockingbird," and "Get Low" completes the circle.

Imagine if Jem and Scout had never met Boo, but grown up continuing to feed his mystery, and bequeathed their fears and questions to their own children: The result would be Felix Bush.

Stories about him abound: That he's secretly rich, or that he once killed several men with just his fists. One day in the 1920s Bush hitches up his mule and wagon and rides into town, and the folks of Caleb County act as if Ichabod Crane has come to call. He's a ghost, and a legend. People have grown so comfortable with the mythology surrounding Bush, they have no idea what to do when the actual man presents himself.

But Bush has business to conduct: He wants to arrange his own funeral, where people can come together to share their stories about him. Finding no satisfaction with the local reverend (Gerald McRaney), he turns to the local funeral home, owned by recent transplant Frank Quinn.

Quinn, deliciously played by Bill Murray, is disturbed by his clientele's reluctance to avail themselves of his services: Business is slow. "One thing about Chicago, people knew how to die -- shot, drowned, run over ... whatever it took."

Quinn is at first put off by Bush's unusual request to attend his own funeral, but is something of a flimflam man and desperately wants the business. "Ooooo ... hermit money," he chants as they first drive up to Bush's remote shack.

But his young protégé, Buddy (a solid Lucas Black), has qualms. As he gets to know Bush, his fears settle into something like sympathy for the ornery old coot. He grows especially worried when Bush announces that he will raffle off his prime 300 acres, and cash starts deluging the funeral home. "Money makes people do funny things," Buddy says, and we can feel him inwardly turn toward Quinn when he says this.

Two other notable characters, wonderfully played by veteran actors, crop up: Mattie (Sissy Spacek), whose history with Bush goes back far enough to pierce his shroud of mystery, and Charlie Jackson (Bill Cobbs), an old preacher who is his only friend and confessor.

Director Aaron Schneider and screenwriters Chris Provenzano and C. Gaby Mitchell recognize this is an actor-driven film, less about a narrative progression than the richness of individual scenes shared by a handful of interesting characters. I enjoyed the film's bleak look and period authenticity, though its conclusion feels too tidy.

It's the complex, yet grounded performance by Duvall that gives the movie its weight and grit. When he first appears, Bush is nearly monosyllabic and impenetrable, but as he grows used to being around people again, a more layered creature emerges from this shell.

Duvall shows us the man who has reveled in being a hermit and is terrified of letting anyone in, but craves the peace he knows he will only find in the company of others.

There's a great scene at the very beginning where, after being pestered by some local boys, Bush takes down his old "No trespassing" sign and puts up a new one: "No damn trespassing! Beware of mule." The oddity of that threat hides an invitation.

3 stars out of four