Tell The Truth - 42 and Race Movie Review

As such a widely consumed vehicle of entertainment, the film industry can encapsulate collective norms, and shape how people look at race relations. Movies like 42 and Race explored established societal hierarchies and Hollywood’s construction and reproduction of power relationships through character’s race. Some film critics condemned the movies for their historical inaccuracies, dramatization of the facts, and historical omissions, such as the fact that 42 completely ignored that Robinson was not the only black player on the Dodgers roster in 1947 (pitcher Dan Bankhead was also on the team in Brooklyn). 

Films that attempt to rigorously portray circumstances accurately can still obscure reality with a general untruthful representation of racial opinions. On the other hand, dramatized and fictionalized scenes in 42 and Race removed the independent identity of Jackie Robinson and Jesse Owens, and embraced the role of the white savior coming to the aid of the black athlete. Fictionalized creations of reality in these films also tended to imply a heroic democratization of sports due to the actions of the athletes, which obscured the maintained prevalence of systematic racism in society. 

42 and Race became problematic pieces of cinema, not from their factual inaccuracies, but when their stories unsettled a truthful representation of structural racism and removed the independent agency of the black athlete to instill their own place in society

42 Movie Trailer

Race Movie Trailer

In 42, Jackie Robinson was turned into a stoic, human myth rather than a complex figure that had to deal with the difficulties of baseball integration. The film failed to contextualize black discrimination in the majors by implying that Robinson’s heroic story could obscure the racial injustices of the past. Dave Zirin complained in the The Nation, “To tell his tale as one of individual triumph through his singular greatness is to not tell the story at all” because the film untruthfully conflated Robinson’s eventual baseball acceptance with overall black social integration. 

Despite accurately portraying the racist vitriol that Phillies manager Ben Chapman shouted at Robinson, the film failed to deftly show the subtle mechanisms of racial discrimination in the 1940s. By creating one of the film’s climatic scenes around teammate Eddie Stanky confronting Chapman, the manager seemed like the singular focus of white hatred against Robinson. In the New York Times, A.O. Scott mentioned how Chapman’s actions were “not an exception to the rule, but an especially ugly instance of it." The film underemphasized the systematic racism that black athletes faced by implicitly creating a sole representative image of that racism. 

Ben Chapman (played by Alan Tudyk) subjected Robinson to extreme racist vitriol.

Some of the film’s dramatizations did reinforce truthful characterizations of Jackie’s independent agency. Although the scene where Robinson was chased by a mob in Wendell Smith’s car was not strictly accurate, he told him “I don’t like needing someone to be there for me.” Jackie’s expressionism was not sullied by a need to show himself as the archetypical heroic figure that suppressed his black rage at the urgency of society. Unlike the rest of the film, Jackie was able to show his raw emotions. The truthfulness of Jackie’s complex humanism was shown through artificial manifestation of reality to symbolize that message.

Nonetheless, the movie largely fictionalized Robinson as a manifestation of Branch Rickey, a player that embodied Rickey’s sentiment of having “the guts not to fight back,” rather than espousing his own identity. As Robinson melted down in the clubhouse after hearing Chapman’s verbal abuse, it was only when Rickey came as the white savior to restore order did the seemingly helpless Robinson return to the field. By portraying Robinson’s emotional breakdown away from the public spectacle, and returning him to silent, individual suffering on the field, the film removed the truthfulness of Robinson’s active attempts to challenge and subvert systematic American racism as a black activist. 

Branch Rickey (played by Harrison Ford) coming to "rescue" Jackie Robinson (played by Chadwick Boseman) and return him to the field for the Dodgers. 

Zirin suggested that the movie followed “the classical Hollywood formula of heroic individual seeds obstacle… obstacle is overcome… the end.” By starting the film with Rickey’s dramatized proclamation, “I’m going to do it,” 42 ensured that the audience would not see Robinson’s identity and heroism as independent from Rickey’s own self-proclaimed courage.

Similarly, when Pee Wee Reese put his arm around Jackie during a ballgame in Cincinnati, a historically contested moment, the dramatized scene showed Reese giving Robinson the courage to continue to play and the transference of agency to Jackie only through the white athlete. 

Pee Wee Reese (played by Lucas Black) putting his arm around Jackie Robinson in Cincinnati.

Even if the film accurately reflected Robinson’s devotion to Ricky and his promise that, “I won’t let you down,” it still created an untruthful narrative of Robinson lacking his own independent agency. For example, years later, Robinson exalted the black power salute of track athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the 1968 Olympics, saying that he took delight in the fact that they were proud to be black. Ultimately, the movie dissociated Robinson from a collective black experience, implying that his internal emotions were an external construction, and making him, as A.O. Scott argued, “the least interesting character” in the film.

In the movie Race, director Stephen Hopkins did a commendable job of establishing Owens’s self-defined identity. The movie gave considerable thought to depicting Owens not merely as a product of the projections of his external environment, but based upon how he decided to present himself. 

When contemplating the request from the NAACP to boycott the Olympics, Owens told Coach Snyder, “Let me make the decision on my own.” Although the relationship between the athlete and the coach was clearly sentimentalized, Owens showed his desire to dictate his own actions and athletic body. Ella Taylor reiterated that idea in NPR as she said, “The point of view belongs not to Coach, but to Owens.” Unlike the mythic glorification of Robinson in 42, Race did not shy away from divulging Owens’s failures to stay faithful to Ruth Solomon, as Stephen Holden recognized in The New York Times when he said, “Owens, although usually well-behaved, can at times also be defiant, willful, and immature.”

Jesse Owens (played by Stephan James) won the 100-meter dash, 220-meter dash, the 220-yard low hurdlers, and the long jump at the NCAA Championships in both 1935 and 1936 under Coach Snyder (played Jason Sudeikis).

Race still lacked a truthful representation of the violent strand of racism present in the 1930s. As Race conspicuously displayed, a film can tell a factually correct story, and yet, still be devoid of an overall truthful illustration of the black experience. Although the movie accurately showed Owens being forced into the back of a bus, and showering only after white athletes, the film treated the racist behavior towards the black community as a mere inconvenience, rather than as a systematic repression. As the crowds wildly cheered for Owens during the movie, it obscured the "unforgivable blackness" of Owens.

Moreover, the film made it seem as though the ideology of white supremacy in Germany was isolated to what Carl Luz called the “insane Nazi government,” and its attempts to depict both domestic and foreign subjugation made it seem as though it was comparing forms of oppression. Race dissociated the German public from their racist dogma, as film director Leni Riefenstahl reinforced to Owens “The world can never forget what you did.” 

At the end of the movie, when a young white boy asked Owens for his autograph, the film implied that the future of race relations was changing simply because of Owens’s victory, although his own future was later constrained by a segregated American society.