42 (2013)
Directed by Brian Helgeland
In 1947, Jackie Robinson becomes the first Black man to play in Major League Baseball facing unabashed racism from the public, the press and other players.
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While baseball dramas will always be a tougher sell on this side of the pond, Brian Helgeland's earnest biopic has a better wide-appeal hook than did 2011's Oscar-nominated Moneyball .
Although 42 is not as far inside baseball as, say, Moneyball, it seems to get it right, with a flurry of exciting and graceful plays that honour the poetry of the game.
Remember Moneyball, the Oscar-nominated story of a groundbreaking GM who turned baseball on its ear by making decisions based on statistical data instead of old-fashioned measures of skill?
(It's not hard to spot similarities to "A League of Their Own.")
Writer-director Brian Helgeland, who won an Oscar for co-scripting L.A. Confidential with Curtis Hanson, does a good job of letting facts rather than flights of fancy steer him through this inspiring story (indeed, many of the movie-friendly lines of dialogue are actually drawn from real life), and he relates the material in a doggedly old-fashioned manner that will appeal to its presumed target audience of seasoned adults.
The film uses one particularly horrifying example to represent the vicious nature of the racism that Robinson faced almost daily, but more often the film, written and directed by Brian Helgeland (screenwriter of L.A. Confidential), accepts the positive in this tale about how one man changed a sport and eventually a nation with his determination and his skill.
Helgeland is more experienced as a screenwriter than as a director, having won an Oscar for best adapted screenplay for L.A. Confidential.
As a writer, Helgeland (who has an Oscar for co-writing another period piece, L.A. Confidential) knows how to give all of his actors just enough material to keep them interesting, while never removing his focus from Robinson and Rickey.