COOL CAT & ROCK STARS

Good stuff this weekend:

Black Panther--Dreamed up by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, Black Panther was the first black superhero of any significance, debuting in Fantastic Four in 1966, and gradually taking over the pages of Marvel's Jungle Action in the '70s. He made his movie debut in 2016's Captain America: Civil War, played, as he is here, by Chadwick Boseman.

The roll that Marvel movies have been on continues, and maybe reaches a high point, with this extravagant, stirring saga. The title character is T'Challa, a royal in Wakanda, a tiny, isolated African nation. He's a rare (maybe singular?) specimen of both the Superman-Captain Marvel type of superhero, in that he has psuedo-scientifically and/or mystically bestowed superhuman powers, and the Doc Savage-Batman-James Bond school, in that he's a rich kid with unlimited technological resources and official sanction.

Wakanda, you see, has a secret: to the outside world it looks like a bucolic third-world backwater, but the big mountains in its center are a projection masking a futuristic, technocratic civilization far in advance of the rest of the world. It's powered by the deposits of an element called "vibranium" on which the country sits and which, along with training and traditional rituals, are also what give our hero his abilities. The Wakandas keep their real nature secret to keep the vibranium from falling into the wrong hands, and to protect themselves and others from the corruption of interfering in other people's affairs. They're like Switzerland, or Star Trek's Federation with its annoying "Prime Directive."

Near the beginning of the film, we see a Wakandan airship cruise into the skyline of this utopia. At the screening, I was sitting next to an African-American friend who leaned over and whispered in my ear "Thanks for the help during slavery." I must admit that, in all my readings of the comic, this potential for resentment of the Wakandans by other people of African descent, and by disadvantaged people in general, had simply never occurred to me. But it turns out to be the center of the movie's conflict.

The story here involves two villains. Klaue (a version of "Klaw" from the comics), a tatted-up South African weapons peddler with a vibranium-powered mechanical arm and a grudge against T'Challa, is played by Andy Serkis, out from behind the CGI for a change, and grinning with jolly murderousness. But in the course of the story he's overtaken as antagonist by Killmonger, a veteran of the U.S. military with an even deeper and more complicated grudge against our hero. Killmonger is played by Michael B. Jordan, who played the leads in director Ryan Coogler's previous films, the enjoyable Creed and the terrifyingly direct Fruitvale Station.

Coogler, who co-wrote the script with Joe Robert Cole, nails nearly every element in Black Panther.  The narrative unfolds conventionally, but with a precision and a steady pace that makes it feel mythic. The movie is unhurried, yet I can't remember a boring moment, and the strength of the emotional payoff in the final minutes may sneak up on you. The costumes, sets and cinematography have a lush visual whimsicality--an affectionate hint of an old-Hollywood idea of Africa--that borders on the tongue-in-cheek but avoids kitsch.

Better than any of this, however, is the cast. Boseman plays iconic figures--Jackie Robinson, James Brown, Thurgood Marshall--so often that it's easy to miss that he plays them as human beings. His princely bearing as T'Challa is used, often and wisely, to comic effect. He's a frequent straight man to the ridiculously glamorous women in the cast: Lupita Nyong'o as his spy love interest, Letitia Wright as his tech-genius little sister--equivalent to Q in the Bond flicks--Angela Basset as his mom, and Danai Gurira as the leader of Wakanda's corps of shaven-headed warrior women.

Jordan, on the other hand, brings a touch of the tragic to his performance without milking it. Other cast members, like Forest Whittaker, Daniel Kaluuya of Get Out, Winston Duke and Martin Freeman as a CIA man, something like Felix Leiter in the Bond stories, bring warmth and individuality to what are, essentially, stock characters.

This movie perpetuates the Star Wars/Lion King idea of royal bloodlines and birthrights being central to society. And it shares the same limitation as most superhero stories: Boiling its conflict down to a climactic fistfight. But within the context of these obligatory elements, this Black Panther is about as good as big-budget blockbuster moviemaking can be.

Early Man--There are armored rhinos in Black Panther, by the way. Did I neglect to mention that?  Yeah, there are armored rhinos in Black Panther, and there are armored mammoths in Early Man, Nick Park's stop-motion animated caveman travesty. This is my kind of weekend at the movies.

It wasn't clear from the initial American TV ads, but Early Man, directed by Park of Wallace and Gromit fame from a script by Mark Burton and James Higginson, is a sports movie--specifically, a soccer movie. Set "near Manchester" (hence its very title is a pun) during the transition from the Stone Age to the Bronze Age, it offers an origin story for the "Beautiful Game."

It's about a tribe of Stone Agers who are dispossessed from their homeland by technically advanced Bronze Agers who want to mine it. The Bronze folk worship football, so Stone Ager Dug (voiced by Eddie Redmayne) challenges them to a match for the right to return to their Valley or, if they lose, to work "down the mine" for the rest of their lives. A young Bronze Age woman, Goona (Maisie Williams), joins the Stone Agers and coaches them, because girls aren't allowed to play back home. Dug's warthog pal Hognob would like to play too, but everybody ignores this. At first.

I'd guess there are lots of soccer-related jokes and references in this movie that are lost on us Yanks, as it both follows and spoofs the template of the underdog sports tale. But at another level, it's a parody of old-school caveman flicks like One Million Years B.C. or When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth, and thus it offers us such showpieces as a towering, fanged duck, the ultimate proof of the dinosaur ancestry of birds.

I'm so in sympathy with this movie's nuttiness that I'm reluctant to admit that it's probably not quite on the level of some of Aardman's other feature efforts, like 2015's Shaun the Sheep Movie, or 2012's The Pirates! Band of Misfits. Besides, so what? Second-tier Aardman is still better than ten regular movies.

SUPERFEUD

Opening this week: 

Captain America: Civil War—In March it was Batman and Superman that couldn’t get along; now it’s the gang over at Marvel. The U.N. wants the Avengers to agree to regulation. Iron Man (Robert Downey, Jr.) thinks it’s a good idea. Captain America (Chris Evans) doesn’t want anyone telling him what he should and shouldn’t do.

I’ve become a bit of a curmudgeon about the current run of superhero flicks; technically eye-popping though they are, most of them seem overlong and humorless to me. That’s true of Civil War too, but I will say I enjoyed it more than Batman v Superman. About midpoint the quarrel leads Iron Man and his pals into a brawl with Cap and his pals at an airport, and the goofy, semi-slapstick action and the trading of corny quips between adversaries really conjured up the fun of reading an old-school comic. For once, the movie didn’t feel like Wagner without the arias.

The point of contention between Iron Man and Cap is, I suppose, a fair dramatization of a central conflict in the American attitude toward the rule of law, especially international law. But whichever side with which you may sympathize ideologically, there’s little doubt of which leading man wins this Civil War from an acting standpoint—Downey is as manically vibrant as ever, while poor Evans is as pleasantly bland a leading man as you can find in American movies right now.

Also adding some liveliness is Paul Rudd, returning as Ant-Man, Chadwick Boseman as Black Panther, and Tom Holland as another new Spider-Man. Spidey gets a new Aunt May his time, too—Marisa Tomei. Yes, that’s right; since the first Spider-Man flick back in 2002 the role of Aunt May has gone from Rosemary Harris to Sally Field to Marisa freakin’ Tomei. It’s a bit of a jolt to realize that Aunt May is two years younger than I am (and looks at least ten years younger).

PASSION PLAY BALL

The story of Jackie Robinson has been told in the movies before, notably in a low-budget 1950 effort called, reasonably enough, The Jackie Robinson Story. The title role in that film (which may be viewed, in its entirety, here) was played by Jackie Robinson himself—rather woodenly, it must be said, but with a dignified presence.

In Brian Helgeland’s oddly enjoyable new film 42—the title refers to Robinson’s number with the Brooklyn Dodgers, the only number retired by all of Major League Baseball—the role is played by Chadwick Boseman, a young TV actor previously unknown to me. Boseman bears some resemblance to Robinson, and he plays him as a stolid, assured man of unembarrassed self-regard, not looking for a fight but not afraid of one, either.

He doesn’t work overly hard to be likable, and as a result, he is. It’s a creditable turn—Boseman manages to hint at some texture and complexity to Robinson, which is an achievement since the role, as written and shot, is almost a pageant figure. The same can be said of Nicole Beharie, who gives an observant intelligence and a touch of sultriness to the all-but-unwritten role of Robinson’s wife Rachel.

Robinson’s struggle, in this telling, isn’t principally against the racist insults he receives as he breaks the color barrier in the Bigs in 1947. It’s against himself—against the agonizing temptation to respond in kind to the appalling snubs and taunts. Boseman lets us see the price of this; he doesn’t sugarcoat it.

When he offers him the job, Dodgers GM Branch Rickey tells Robinson that to accept him, whites have to know two things: “That you are a fine gentleman, and a great baseball player.” Rickey seems to have had an uncannily prescient grasp of white racial psychology, of how ordinary justified anger would seem like overscaled rage coming from a “negro.” Virtually every African-American who’s been a pioneer in a previously all-white field has had to try to avoid this without lapsing into servility on the other side.

Because of Robinson’s near-perfect navigating of these straights, his story is probably almost as well known to a couple of generations of elementary-school civics-class students as it is to baseball fans. I’m not sure that 42 adds anything much to it, aside from a devotional tone—again and again, the movie reminded me of an old-school Biblical epic.

Partly this is because of its ornately declarative dialogue, and the glossy, burnished look that Helgeland gives the images. But the movie is also overtly pious. Rickey was a devout Methodist, as was Robinson—it’s suggested that this may be why Rickey favored him—and he counsels his new player that he’ll have to turn the other cheek, “Like Our Savior.” He also says, more than once, “God built him to last” (only until the age of 53, as it turned out, but probably Rickey would regard this as sufficient).

Rickey’s perfectly comprehensible financial incentive for bringing black players to his team is noted in 42, early and often, by Rickey himself, and this seems intended to debunk a cynical interpretation. We’re meant to see that, for him, this action was really religious and moral. The movie even ends with Sister Wynona Carr’s wonderful gospel song “The Ball Game” (also used, to more ironic effect, in Ron Shelton’s interesting 1994 misfire Cobb).

It’s understandable if contemporary viewers find the idea that the integration of a professional sport, however overdue, can really carry this sort of cosmic import. But for many of us, baseball, with its weird orthodoxies and its ceremonial, Stations-of-the-Cross flow of action, always feels, in a way that no other sport can claim, like an allegory for Something Bigger.

I don’t mean to give the impression that 42 is like sitting through a requiem mass. It’s generously leavened with humor, and—as is often the case with religious epics—much of the fun comes from the character actors in the supporting parts. In good form here are Christopher Meloni as Leo Durocher, Max Gail as Burt Shotton, Alan Tudyk as the intolerable Ben Chapman and Lucas Black as Pee Wee Reese. John C. McGinley gives his lines an amusingly fussy, euphemistic ring in the small role of Red Barber.

Maybe the true heart of the film, however, is the performance of Harrison Ford as Branch Rickey. Ford has always been a reliable star, but for most of his career, with a few striking exceptions, he’s been a leading man, not a character actor. Here, portly and fleshy-faced, with a self-delighted grin and a deep, comically ponderous delivery, Ford creates a peculiarly convincing portrait of a man of the world still ruled by his heart—a rich man who, if he were a camel, might just make it through the eye of that needle.