;An Important True Story- Great Focus Film

Rating: 9/10 (26 October 2013)

If you walk into this movie just thinking it is about Jackie Robinson, your missing the boat. The great television producer Ken Burns has already done that and not very well in his Baseball series. Burns over reached in telling the Robinson story there because his made it seem like there was nobody playing baseball except Robinson which was not the purpose he intended in trying to tell the story of the sport.
This movie does not over reach. The script is about the drama of what Robinson did and the reactions to it. Chadwick Boseman as Robinson is magnificent in the movie. Harrison Ford plays the stuffy Branch Rickey, interested in the almighty green perfectly. The support cast, especially the small role of Leo The Lip Durocher who was still womanizing in 1969 when the Miracle Mets blew apart the Cubs during the first Moon Landing is spot on.
The heart of this movie and the message is how wrong hate is and the guts it takes to overcome hate. It is hate that costs all of us the opportunity to be better. The movie touches on this early on with the references to World War 2 battling hate though it glosses over the sad story of blacks being still segregated from whites in the service during World War 2 that was reality. It took Harry Truman to finally end segregation after the war.
The movie does point out how difficult it was for Robinson to cross a line forbidden until then because of pure hate. It is an accurate portrayal. I saw it happen in real life in the 1960's. That was when I became one of the first boys to play for a woman manager in Little League Baseball.
I saw the fathers on the field and in the stands spew hate at her. The hate became more intense when we went undefeated the first season, won the championship the 2nd season and just barely lost the championship game her third season. The hate never stopped and after 3 seasons she stopped fighting a battle in which their hate never let up because she was years ahead of her time. The sad thing was the fathers did not seem to learn that a woman could coach and manage a team until years later. Her courage in crossing that line is the kind of courage this story highlights about Jackie Robinson.
If only there was a way for this movie to teach how destructive this hate is and reach everybody to eliminate it, this would be the most valuable film ever. I personally witnessed Coaches in the last 10 years hating a player in a port so intensely, that they destroyed that player, bullying them until they literally destroyed their dream of playing anymore. The adults who did this were petty but in no way different than the ones who stood in the way of Jackie Robinson. The world loses every time hate triumphs.
Here is the true story where hate is gloriously defeated and a handbook on how difficult it is to step out against people who are petty. Those people still exist, and the lesson here needs to be taught over and over again until we get it right. Trouble is no matter how hard we battle to fight hate, the victories are too small and for some reason hate always continues to exist.