On Friday 42, the big-screen treatment of Jackie Robinson starring Chadwick Boseman as the player who integrated Major League Baseball and Branch Rickey as the man who gave him the contract to do it, hits theaters. Unfortunately, what could have been a nuanced and complex exploration of racism and the role of sports in progressive movements and American life at large is a cliched, hackneyed mess that exists more to lionize Branch Rickey than to explore the real journey to desegregating America’s game. ThinkProgress sports columnist Travis Waldron and I saw 42 together, and discuss the problems with the movie’s treatment of history—as well as with its acting and writing—here:

Hi Travis,

On Wednesday, you and I headed out to see 42, the Jackie Robinson biopic that might be better titled The Oracular Pronouncements Of The Sainted Branch Rickey. I think we both walked out of the theater thinking that it was a terrible movie: there’s no human moment the script can’t resist immediately quashing with cliched oratory, and with a few exceptions, it seems to have some real anxieties about portraying the uglier side of racism.

I want to talk about all of those things, but I thought we should start with the one thing the movie got right: the economics of bringing Jackie Robinson to the major leagues. “New York is full of Negro baseball fans,” Rickey (Harrison Ford, overacting so dramatically I’m amazed he isn’t sponsored by the ham council) tells his assistant Harold at the beginning of the movie. “Dollars aren’t black and white. They’re green.” When a gas station attendant refuses Robinson access to the toilet when his Negro League team is on the Deep South, Robinson blackmails him into desegregating it by suggesting the team can buy its gas elsewhere. “Jack, is this about politics?” a white reporter asks him at his first spring training. “It’s about getting paid,” Jackie (Chadwick Boseman, who might have had a star turn with a better script) tells him. “I’m in the baseball business,” Rickey tells Robinson at a later point. “With you and the other black players I hope to bring up next year, I can build a team that can win the World Series. And a World Series means money.” Dodgers manager Leo Durocher (a fantastic Christopher Meloni) lectures his players, some of whom oppose the idea of playing with Robinson, “I’ll play an elephant if it’ll help us win…We’re playing for money, here. Winning is the only thing that matters.” Durocher himself is suspended from baseball when the Catholic Youth Organization threatens to boycott the league over his affair with a married actress. Even the racist manager of the Philadelphia Phillies, Ben Chapman (a very strong Alan Tudyk) recognizes the economic imperatives, taunting Robinson at the plate “You’re here to get the nigger dollars for Rickey at the gate.”

That economic imperative story is interesting, and it’s important—and it’s a critical reminder that the decision to desegregate baseball wasn’t simply done out of the goodness of Branch Rickey’s heart. I actually wonder if that’s one of the reasons we haven’t seen an out player in professional sports, yet. Unlike with black players and black fans, who were visibly excluded from the game, and who represented a clear pool of both ticket dollars and playing talent that were shut out of sports, it’s not as if there are alternate gay leagues and alternate gay fan bases that are visible to mainstream sports and mainstream executives.

But it’s a story that pretty much gets smothered in sentiment. What did you think? I’m particularly curious what your reaction was to the way 42 presents how Robinson’s teammates came around to his presence on the club.

Cheers,
Alyssa
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Well, this is one music industry biopic I’m actually excited to see, and that has some chance of not disgracing or white-washing the person being portrayed: Benedict Cumberbatch is set to play Brian Epstein. Per The Hollywood Reporter:

Todd Graff wrote the screenplay, whose focus is not a story about The Beatles from Epstein’s point of view but the story of Epstein himself. Sometimes called the “fifth Beatle,” Epstein signed the band in 1961 — before Beatlemania hit — and died in 1967 from an accidental drug overdose. He was a closet homosexual and suffered from gambling and drug addictions — and was many times the glue that held the band together. The producers describe the project as the story of “the man who threw the biggest party of the 1960s but ultimately forgot to invite himself.”

Further signs of optimism: Graff wrote and directed the excellent Camp. And Tom Hanks is going to produce through Playtone, a decision that produced the excellent and mysteriously underrated That Thing You Do.

That movie looked at an American band in the same era as the rise of the Beatles, and told its story through the perspective of the band’s drummer, a late addition to the group, rather than primarily through the perspective of their manager, played by Hanks. But it had a nice, deft sense of what it takes to wrangle young men who are just getting famous, and of the commercial structure that elevated promising bands in the era. Hopefully, this look at Epstein’s life will have those same nice grace notes, and get away from the Lennon-McCartney cliches, without wallowing too much in Tragic Gayness.

The Wall Street Journal reports that, just as was the case after the death of Osama bin Laden when movie projects on the subject became hot Hollywood currency, a number of studios are contemplating biopics about Julian Assange. The Wikileaks founder’s story is undoubtedly commercially compelling, whether someone’s looking to make a technological thriller with more realistic politics than Hackers, a movie about indefinite detention, given the consequences Bradley Manning has faced for giving documents to Assange, or a spy-ish picture that raises more intelligent questions about the impact and viability of government secrecy. Any and all of those movies would be fascinating things to see Hollywood try to attempt, though the results would inevitably vary.

But I’m honestly curious to see if any of the studios in contention here are going to focus on the sexual assault charges against Assange, and if so, how they’ll handle them. Assange has always seemed like a fascinating case for how powerful people prioritize the treatment of women and the abuse of them by powerful men when other issues they care about are at stake. If you support Assange’s work, as filmmakers like Michael Moore and Ken Loach, who put up bail money for him in his sexual assault case did, that does not mean he’s incapable of committing assault, that the charisma that won Assange supporters also rendered his negotiations of consent with women he had sex with clear and uncomplicated. Trying to balance the presumption of innocence and the idea that rape victims, who are particularly subject to discrediting and shaming when they come forward, deserve respect and the opportunity for a fair hearing is something that appears difficult enough for our society. A case like Assange’s, in which some of his famous supporters often couldn’t stop at asserting his right to a presumption of innocence and right to a fair trial, heightens that challenge, plays it out on an international scale. A movie that can even lay out those issues cogently, much less suggesting any sort of solution, would be a real accomplishment.

Hemingway & Gellhorn, HBO’s splashy biopic of Ernest (a mustached Clive Owen) and journalist Martha (an ass-baring Nicole Kidman) has been thoroughly filleted by my fellow critics, and I’m not going to replicate their complaints against what I found to be an oddly trite movie. But there was one thing I found rather striking about it, though more as a cautionary tale than as a thing to praise: the shifts between dramatically different styles of cinematography. Watching Hemingway & Gellhorn felt more than a little like flipping through an Instagram stream, though to less evocative effect.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with juxtaposing these different styles and signaling changes in tone for a pair of extremely mercurial people. When Hemingway battles a marlin in Key West, the frame is saturated in blues that in a final shot are soaked in red to mark his suicide by shotgun. In Cuba, and in the throes of marital bliss, they’re captured in blurry pops of color. The image takes on an HD sharpness when it lingers on the breasts and buttocks of dancers in a club who inspire Hemingway and Gellhorn to slip away from a drunken twist, the sight of these beautiful women in their act and changing costumes heightening their mutual desire.

But when it come to the couples’ work, the stylistic showiness of Hemingway & Gellhorn ends up distancing us from the emotion it wants to convey rather than strengthening it. When Hemingway and Gellhorn are working together in Spain during the Spanish Civil War, she filing dispatches for Collier’s, he shooting The Spanish Earth, the movie captures them in the sepia tones and occasionally jerky moments that replicate the kind of footage he and his crew are capturing. When Gellhorn sees a burned baby in China or encounters a young girl with a pet turtle in an opium den, they’re in black-and-white, which lends a documentary cast to her encounters, but also means we don’t have to reckon with the full, horrifying state of the baby’s skin, the damage done to the young girl. And when Gellhorn flees the sight of the horrors at Dachau, she stumbles through a Brothers’ Grimm-style forest cast in mossy grays. Maybe the show’s budget prevented a full-scale or even minor-scale recreation of a concentration camp, but the sequence ends up treating her more like a fairy-tale heroine than a correspondent bearing witness. She sees ugliness, her capacity to bear witness to it is one of the things that defines her, but the movie can’t bear to show us anything but loveliness even in the midst of Gellhorn’s trauma. Both of these sequences would have had much more power had they been presented straightforwardly, if we saw what she saw with a Hollywood approximation of how she saw it.

The thing that’s fun about Instagram is that we can use it to make our lives look more heightened and dramatic than they usually are. But Ernest Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn’s lives are supposed to already be as exciting as we’d like to make ours look. The flashiness of the cinematography in Hemingway & Gellhorn feels like an indication of lack of confidence in their story, rather than the deployment of available tactics where they’re needed. Just because you can saturate something with color or swath it in sepia doesn’t mean you have to.

I wrote about the news that a Jackie Robinson biopic was in the works last year, and expressed some concern that the movie had found its Branch Rickey—initially Robert Redford, now, apparently, Harrison Ford—before its Jackie Robinson, who rightfully should be at the center of the movie. But I am glad to hear that the movie is starting production, and that it’s supposed to reach theaters on April 12, 2013.

It seems like some of the other cast is shaping up nicely. Sensitive hardasses are Christopher Meloni’s wheelhouse, so he should be dandy as Leo Durocher, the manager who laid down a clear line in support of Robinson. T.R. Knight, who knows a thing or two himself about hostile workplaces and coworker solidarity, will play Ralph Branca, the first Dodger player who stood with Robinson in public. And Nicole Beharie, who was just smashing as Michael Fassbender’s coworker and potential girlfriend in Shame will play Rachel Isum, Robinson’s wife. I just am not that familiar with Chadwick Boseman, who is playing Robinson, and I do worry that the movie who will marginalize him in favor of exploring the reactions of white people to a key moment in Civil Rights history. But it is nice for a younger, less-famous black actor to get a shot at stardom through a big sports biopic.

This is pretty amazing: Idris Elba is going to be playing Nelson Mandela in a new biopic. Normally, I’d say we absolutely don’t need another Mandela biopic. But I think this project is intriguing because it’s meant to focus on Mandela’s on younger years, before he became an icon of non-violent resistance, when he was saying things like this:

Firstly, we believed that as a result of Government policy, violence by the African people had become inevitable, and that unless responsible leadership was given to canalize and control the feelings of our people, there would be outbreaks of terrorism which would produce an intensity of bitterness and hostility between the various races of this country which is not produced even by war. Secondly, we felt that without violence there would be no way open to the African people to succeed in their struggle against the principle of white supremacy. All lawful modes of expressing opposition to this principle had been closed by legislation, and we were placed in a position in which we had either to accept a permanent state of inferiority, or to defy the Government. We chose to defy the law. We first broke the law in a way which avoided any recourse to violence; when this form was legislated against, and then the Government resorted to a show of force to crush opposition to its policies, only then did we decide to answer violence with violence.

It’s easy to forget, and a lot of people do, that Mandela was imprisoned in the first place in part for his involvement in the formation of Umkhonto we Sizwe, which was the armed wing of the African National Congress. If you think about it, casting the guy who played Stringer Bell as a political activist who is trying to organize a unit that was capable of carrying out sabotage and guerilla warfare makes a lot of sense. I’d actually really love to see David Simon, or someone with his sense of organizations, write a big movie about South African anti-apartheid leadership and the apartheid regime.

I was unexpectedly sad two days before Christmas to learn that John Lawrence, the plaintiff Lawrence v. Texas, which overturned sodomy laws in the United States, had died in late November virtually unnoticed by the country he helped change, and to learn from that obituary that Tyron Garner, with whom he was arrested for having sex (though both men said they were never intimate) had died in 2006. The news touched me not just because I was volunteering for Freedom to Marry Massachusetts the summer the Lawrence decision came down, and so felt it as a victory in a battle I was engaged in, but because it made me think about what happens to people after they do their part to make history and memory and its failures.

Biopics of very famous people have become an extremely reliable way for acclaimed actors to finally claim the hardware that has eluded them for other parts, or to claim more hardware and a confirmation of their greatness. But we don’t really need a biopic about Margaret Thatcher, whose life and legacy seem sufficiently understood. Even a figure like Ronald Reagan, whose life and legacy are distorted almost continually, doesn’t seem particularly needy: the myths and corrections are issued quickly and forcefully. There will be no authoritative version of his life in film or otherwise—partisans on both sides are sure they have the truth already. Sometimes, a biopic does the interesting thing of illuminating a very great and famous person through someone who played a pivotal role in their life. The King’s Speech may have seemed to some people an unworthy trifle to bring in such a haul earlier this year, but it has the virtues of being a fine film about class and medicine in addition to an illumination of a king.

But how about the people who were the real sparks to history themselves—after all, if there hadn’t been Lionel Logue, there would have been someone else, and more importantly, there still would have been the speech—but are forgotten. We’ve done a better job of remembering the Little Rock Nine than we have James Lawrence and Tyron Garner, even though they’re further in the distance, but even then, we see them as elements in a collective image. We don’t know very much about what makes them decide to integrate a school. And we don’t know very much about what made a Texas medical technician decide he could carry forth as the representative of a difficult cause, and how it came to be that one of his lawyers didn’t even know he’d died after their great victory. Good biopics should do more than affirm the greatness of the great. They should tell us something about history, particularly when it fails us and fails us quickly.

When I was writing yesterday’s post about dictators and culture, I was reminded of how fascinated I’ve always been by the women who the partners of authoritarian or repressive leaders. They’re a fascinating reminder that second-wavey ideas about women being more peaceful or nurturing than men can be entirely and terrifyingly untrue. And they’re a great way of examining the moral choices that allow such regimes to thrive.

1.The Director: Jiang Qing. I should have mentioned this former actress as a perfect example of the dictatorial effort to set up the government as a source of joy by dominating culture, and you could tell a fabulously scary story about her through a look at a single production. She interfered with the Beijing Opera, interfered what she called “revolutionary plays” ran the film section of Communist China’s propaganda ministry, and even discovered Joan Chen. Glee and Smash would have absolutely nothing on her in a story that could be about both the coercive power of government and the tyranny of people who are convinced they’re artistic visionaries.

2. The Escapee: Malyamu Amin. To a certain extent, The Last King of Scotland is an exploration of the life and death of Kay Amin, Idi Amin’s youngest wife, who is said to have had an abortion go wrong. But the movie isn’t from Kay’s perspective — her mutilated body is the means by which an arrogant young Scottish doctor comes to consciousness. And wouldn’t it be fascinating to see a tyrant through the eyes of his first wife, to try to understand what it must be like to see your husband become a monster — and to watch her make the decision to get out?

3. The Mother: Sajida Khairallah Talfah. Gillian Darmody and the other nightmare mothers of antihero television have precisely nothing on Saddam Hussein’s first wife in terms of producing deeply messed-up. One of her sons, Uday Hussein, was apparently a serial rapist and killed the man he believed introduced Saddam to his second wife at a party for another authoritarian leader’s wife, Suzanne Mubarak. He also ran a nasty little sideline torturing Iraqi athletes who underperformed in world competitions. Her other son, Qusay, managed to keep his crimes at the level of the state, wiping out the environment that was the home to the Marsh Arabs and rare bird species, and cracking down on dissidents. Her husband may have also murdered her brother. What can it be like to be the widow to such a man? The mother to such dead sons? She does play a role in House of Saddam.

4. The Pretender: Magda Goebbels: In a sense, she was the closest thing Germany had to a first lady, because Adolf Hitler hid his relationship with Eva Braun to avoid putting anything in the way of German women’s fantasies. A wealthy divorcee when she married Goebbels, she was humiliated by his affairs (though she had her own) and asked Hitler for permission to divorce his propaganda minister. Ultimately, they stayed together, and Magda supported the regime even though she privately doubted it, made no move to save her Jewish stepfather from death in a concentration camp, and helped kill her six children before killing herself with her husband. Again, it’s not as if there haven’t been portrayals of her on film before. But it would be fascinating and dreadful to see the story from her perspective, to see Magda go from bourgie flirt to participant in a genocidal regime.

5. Eva Peron, again. Sure, we’ve got Evita. And yes, her husband is nowhere near as bad as the spouses of the other women on this list. But in some ways, the more interesting story about Eva Peron is what happened to her after she died. Her enbalmed body was supposed to go on display in a monument that would rival the Statue of Liberty. Instead, it vanished for 16 years, and she ended up buried under another name in Milan. Tomás Eloy Martínez’s Santa Evita turns the mystery into a macabre and fascinating horror, complete with wax replicas and corpse desecration. But either way, it’s a fascinating illustration of how an even more restrictive regime tried to erase the memory of the one that followed it, and to dismantle a cult of personality.

In yesterday’s post about biopics, I wrote that “we need a more creative approach to biopics that’s oriented towards truly great stories instead of just the most famous people who a talented actor would enjoy impersonating.” Today, Hollywood gives me exactly what I want! (I really should make demands more often.) Apparently, a biopic’s under way about Desmond Doss, a conscientious objector who, though he wouldn’t carry a gun, at great personal risk worked as a medic during the Battle of Okinawa and saved the lives of 75 men who were wounded. He also won the Congressional Medal of Honor.

The story poses really interesting challenges: I can’t wait to see someone dramatize a major action sequence where the main character can’t, or won’t participate, which I assume has to be a really difficult stance to maintain in the midst of a battle people later named the Typhoon of Steel.* And given how far we are from the last American draft, I wonder if audiences who have never had to face the prospect of being forced to go to a war they’d rather not fight personally will have trouble relating to Doss’ character. But even if this was fiction, it would be a pretty creative take on action and war movies. And the fact that it’s true just makes it astonishing.

*Side note: how has George R.R. Martin not stolen that title?

Of the many Johnny Depp projects in the pipeline, the one I think has the most potential to be genuinely interesting is a biopic of Theodore Geisel, better known, of course, as Doctor Seuss. Geisel’s work is both wildly commercially successful and intensely political, and his political cartooning (which I highly recommend) veers between contradictory impulses of anti-Japanese racism and condemnations of anti-Semitism and racism directed at African-Americans. He both created great entertainment for children (The Cat in the Hat is the result of a challenge to see if he could write an educational book using only 250 words important for young readers) and never had any — in fact, a long-term affair contributed to his wife’s suicide. I don’t really know that I think Depp is the right person to play Geisel — he runs the risk of being purely wacky — but Geisel is an enormously fitting and interesting subject for a biopic, and not merely because I’m so manifestly pleased by anyone who manages to make great entertainment out of serious political ideas.