It’s been far too long since Hollywood has given audiences a nostalgic, Americana baseball movie. As much as I loved Bennett Miller’s Moneyball, he’d be the first to tell you that baseball was the third- or fourth-most dominant theme in the Oscar-nominated drama. So I’m looking to 42, writer-director Brian Helgeland’s biopic on the late, great Jackie Robinson, to reinstate that love of the game that cinema often feeds – and this new featurette from Warner Bros. and Legendary Pictures is helping to fuel that fire.
The tease gives us our first real look at footage from 42, and it's tinged with that amber hue associated with baseball’s vintage era. You can’t see a recreation of Ebbets Field, home of the Brooklyn Dodgers, and not get excited. But the clip also gives us stirring insight from the likes of Rachel Robinson – Jackie’s spouse – on why now is the right time to go back and revisit the impact this groundbreaking player had on the game and the racial divide that ran through the major leagues back in 1947.
Helgeland will approach Robinson’s legacy through the relationship he had with Brooklyn Dodgers team executive Branch Rickey, who’ll be played on screen by Harrison Ford. The coveted role of Jackie falls to Chadwick Boseman, a young television actor who turned several heads with his work on Persons Unknown and Lincoln Heights. Now, much like Robinson, he’s getting a shot at the big leagues with an opportunity to breathe life into an athletic legend … and trade screen time with a Hollywood icon like Ford.
42 will be in theaters on April 12 … just in time for the start of the Major League Baseball season. Perfect timing.
