Mark Reviews Movies: A JOURNAL FOR JORDAN

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Review by Mark Dujsik | December 23, 2021

The basic intention of A Journal for Jordan, based on the true story experienced and recalled (in article and, later, memoir forms) by Dana Canedy, is admirable. This is a story of a grief, lived by a woman who has no real sense of closure and seems reluctant to find any, lest the truth of her situation strike even harder than it already has. The movie, written by Virgil Williams and directed by Denzel Washington, has that sense of evasion, too, although its intentions aren't as emotionally pure or thematically consistent as this story would seem to suggest.

Structurally, Williams' screenplay is a bit jumbled and manipulative, too. It begins in the 2000s, with Dana (Chanté Adams), a reporter for the New York Times, fighting for professional recognition, while also raising a 1-year-old son Jordan on her own. She's in mourning, or at least, that's what her co-worker/friend Miriam (Susan Pourfar) suggests, as Dana avoids talking about how she ended up a single mother. To make things clear to her son later in his life, she starts writing letters to him, gradually revealing the story of how she met his father—and, eventually, what happened to him.

Here, everything of any significance more or less comes to a standstill. Most of this story is told in flashbacks, with occasional and brief scenes of Dana moving along with her life and the son growing up as various lengths of years pass (Jordan is most prominently played, as a teenager, by Jalon Christian in the movie's last act). Dana first met Jordan's father in her parents' living room, while visiting home for a holiday. He's Charles Monroe King (Michael B. Jordan), a handsome and polite military man, who constantly calls Dana "ma'am" and patiently waits outside her motel room when she, not waking up in time for breakfast with him, has to get out of bed and make herself presentable.

The relationship is developed and entirely grounded in such trivial details and incidents. There's the cutesy stuff of Dana not quite being up to Charles' rigorous sense of routine, and there's the fact that Charles is so devastatingly attractive that Dana almost immediately rejects her philosophy that men are a "luxury," not a "necessity." He has his flaws, of course, namely that he wears dirty and old sneakers. In the big picture of everything this movie wants to communicate about this relationship and where it ultimately goes, Williams makes a considerable to-do about that, as well as a lot of other such minor moments and issues.

All of this is clearly meant to endear Dana, Charles, and the blossoming romance to us. The stacking of such little details and the slow progression of the relationship only make it apparent how one-dimensionally these characters have been written. The two leads seem unable to escape that fact, too. Adams, who shows some solid comedic instincts in the early parts of the romance and some better displays of emotion as the story reaches its inevitable tragedy, at least has those character qualities upon which to rest.

On the other side of the romance, Jordan comes across as uncharacteristically bored in his role as Charles, who's presented as such an ideal and in such idealistic terms that there's nothing of substance to him. Considering the character's fate (It's so obvious that it's difficult to recall how long the movie delays revealing it) and the gimmick that all of this comes from Dana's possibly romanticized memories, the presentation of Charles makes some sense. That doesn't make the portrayal any less shallow, though.

Years pass in the flashbacks, leading up to the attacks on September 11 and a war in Iraq, and in Dana's present-day attempts to move forward with her life and as a mother. The eponymous journal, written for the son by the father, becomes akin to a holy text for the teenage Jordan. Since this is neither the father's story (In the flashbacks, Charles develops a nasty cough, which ends up being more a deceitful fake-out than any commentary on the conditions forced upon military personnel) nor about the son's experiences, the sentiments and lessons within it sound more like the stuff on a greeting card.

Obviously, all of these critiques are specific to Canedy's story as adapted and communicated by the filmmakers. A Journal for Jordan tells an undeniably devastating real-life story in a cheap and unconvincing way.

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