A Jour­nal for Jordan

Don­ning the director’s cap for the fourth time, it seemed that Den­zel Wash­ing­ton was set­ting him­self up for suc­cess by enlist­ing Michael B Jor­dan for his adap­ta­tion of New York Times jour­nal­ist Dana Canedy’s mem­oir. The sto­ry cen­tres Dana’s (Chan­té Adams) strug­gle with grief, as well as a col­lec­tion of jour­nal entries writ­ten by Unit­ed States Army First Sergeant Charles Mon­roe King (Michael B Jor­dan) for his infant son Jor­dan. When Charles meets a trag­ic death in Iraq, Jor­dan has to piece togeth­er his father’s iden­ti­ty through the tit­u­lar journal.

In a con­stant cycle of flash­backs and time­jumps – odd­ly sign­post­ed by cap­tions in Times New Roman – Den­zel ren­ders Canedy’s mem­oir into a corny and soapy melo­dra­ma that looks as if it were plucked from the ear­ly 2000s. Dana first meets Charles in her par­ents’ liv­ing room, vis­it­ing home for a hol­i­day. We then see the cou­ple fall in love, cope with the strain of dis­tance, along with how Dana learns to cope with the empti­ness caused by her beloved’s untime­ly death.

Charles is posthu­mous­ly depict­ed as a saint: an earnest mil­i­tary man with work­ing class sen­si­bil­i­ties and a love for pointil­list art, whose only flaw is wear­ing the same pair of worn-out train­ers every­where he goes. Any­thing that might com­pli­cate this saint­ly por­trait is con­ve­nient­ly omit­ted. We find out that he has an ex-wife and daugh­ter, but the film nev­er acknowl­edges his rela­tion­ship with them.

Sole­ly rely­ing on Dana’s sub­jec­tive and roman­ti­cised mem­o­ries, it makes sense that the nar­ra­tive would paint Charles with such ide­al­is­tic brush­strokes, but by deny­ing him com­plex­i­ty, his por­tray­al becomes otiose, shal­low and unre­al­is­tic. It also doesn’t help that Michael B Jor­dan injects none of his sig­na­ture charm or charis­ma to the role, appear­ing to be con­stant­ly stiff and robotic.

A Jour­nal for Jor­dan suf­fers from a mean­der­ing pace, and leans too heav­i­ly into the mil­i­tary aspects of its nar­ra­tive. Uncrit­i­cal depic­tions of war will always be dan­ger­ous to our col­lec­tive his­tor­i­cal mem­o­ry. Yes, sol­diers are brave, but shouldn’t we at least ques­tion the inter­ests at stake?

There’s not much that’s hero­ic about a depic­tion of an Amer­i­ca-lov­ing, career-dri­ven cou­ple with a skewed world­view that favours mil­i­tary pro­pa­gan­da. It’s con­ser­v­a­tive America’s wet dream, so the film will def­i­nite­ly find an audi­ence with Boomers look­ing to uncrit­i­cal­ly con­sume a tear­jerk­er with a strong patri­ot­ic, pro-mil­i­tary and pro-Chris­t­ian message.

If the expec­ta­tion was that Vir­gil Williams’ (Mud­bound) script would ele­vate the film, it’s all the more puz­zling when it turns out to be its biggest flaw. And con­sid­er­ing the impact of Denzel’s pre­vi­ous direc­to­r­i­al effort (Fences) which earned Vio­la Davis an Acad­e­my Award, it’s even more dis­ap­point­ing when A Jour­nal for Jor­dan ends up being a cheap and con­trived inter­pre­ta­tion of an unde­ni­ably heart­break­ing story.

In spite of its trite pre­dictabil­i­ty and over­long run­ning time, it’s clear­ly a lov­ing trib­ute with its heart in the right place, but the source mate­r­i­al was per­haps treat­ed with so much respect that the por­tray­al of the rela­tion­ship fails to gen­er­ate any heat or emo­tion­al inten­si­ty. What we’re left with is a final prod­uct that’s incon­se­quen­tial and crush­ing­ly maudlin.