![]() (He’s so used to his scruffy sneakers and baggy Army duds that he thinks he looks like an accountant.)īut the cultural differences between them don’t just cutely melt away. Dana and Charles have a long-distance relationship, and when he first visits her, we grin at how quickly the taking-it-slowly thing falls away, and at how anguished he feels in the suave suit she wants to buy him. She has opened a door - for herself, and for others - that she feels she can’t let shut. She lives in New York, where she’s one of the few Black reporters on the Times and therefore feels incredible pressure attached to everything she does. Jordan makes Charles a rock-solid presence, but the film takes its zigs and zags from how Chanté Adams plays Dana as affectionate yet demanding, to the point that it chafes at Charles. He’s divorced, with a 9-year-old daughter who lives with her mother in Texas. Some of the most revealing things about Charles are the ones he’s sly about, like his old-school music tastes (driving in the car with Dana, he plays “Sadie” by the Spinners), or the pointillistic drawings he does as a hobby, or the fact that he doesn’t come with a perfect romantic track record. His smile is as chiseled as his muscles he invests Charles with a deliberation that suggests everything he’s not saying. Jordan, in this role, has the self-possessed calm of someone who’s past proving himself. It’s not only his bearing that’s military, or his physique (I’d be derelict if I didn’t report that at the preview showing I attended, when Charles entered a bedroom wearing a sleeveless T-shirt, the audience screamed). ![]() Jordan, in movies like “Black Panther” and “Creed,” has been an explosive presence, but here he reins himself in and is still magnetic. But chemistry is chemistry, and these two actors have it. So she’s definitely not straying far from the tree - and given that her father was an adulterer who she now looks at askance, that may be a fraught choice. Her dad (Robert Wisdom) is a retired Army sergeant, and Charles was one of his men. ![]() I mean that Washington, in making a buttoned-down, aw-shucks-ma’am military lifer his romantic hero, portrays the kind of character we wouldn’t be surprised to see at the center of a Clint Eastwood movie, but one who’s less common in many of the products of liberal Hollywood.ĭana first encounters him at her parents’ home. By that I don’t mean a Republican impulse. I have no idea where Denzel Washington stands politically, but he described himself in a recent interview as “a God-fearing man,” and “A Journal for Jordan” is a fascinating Hollywood movie to confront at this moment because it feels animated, in some ways, by a conservative impulse. “A Journal for Jordan” dives into the drama of two people falling in love: the hope and the beauty, the bumps in the road that nearly derail the relationship, the emotional anchor that holds it together, and the thing we’re left with on the other side - the feeling of a life having been lived. Jordan, who is a movie star to his bones (and a whale of an actor himself), the doom quickly recedes. And since Dana is played by Chanté Adams, the brilliant actor from “Roxanne Roxanne” and “The Photograph,” and King is played by Michael B. Or, rather, it’s a movie that looks at tragedy - at sacrifice - through a lens that’s both sentimental and stirring. Yet “A Journal for Jordan,” which opens on Christmas Day, is not a tragedy. Since the two characters meet in the late ’90s, we can make a pretty good guess as to what war that will happen in. It is shadowed, however, by a sense of doom, since in the opening minutes of the film we learn that King was killed in action. It’s a happy story, if not without a tangle or two. The new movie is based on a memoir by the former New York Times reporter Dana Canedy, and in terms that are romantically glowing but not cloyingly starry-eyed, it tells the story of Canedy - ambitious, vivacious, emotionally solitary - and First Sergeant Charles Monroe King, the upright military man she met, fell in love with, and came out of her brainy shell to be with. It’s the fourth feature directed by Denzel Washington, and unlike his last one, the epic and lacerating “Fences” (2016), this one takes us back to the life-affirming feel-good middlebrow sincerity of his first two films as a director, “Antwone Fisher” (2002) and “The Great Debaters” (2007). ![]() Back in the 1980s, it would have been right down the middle of the plate. In a year-end movie landscape marked, on the one hand, by a stream of prestige adult dramas that struggle more than ever to find actual adults to see them, and on the other hand by the kind of oversize fantasy event films (“Spider-Man: No Way Home,” the upcoming “The Matrix Resurrections”) whose job it now is to keep the industry alive, “ A Journal for Jordan” feels like an odd movie out more than it might have, say, 20 years ago. ![]()
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