Stream It Or Skip It: ‘A Journal for Jordan’ on VOD, an Earnest Drama That’s a Directorial Dud from Denzel Washington

Now on VOD, A Journal for Jordan is notable for being Denzel Washington’s fourth directorial effort, and among them, the third BOATS (Based On A True Story) movie. This one is the story of real-life Pulitzer-winning journalist Dana Canedy, who wrote a memoir based on her late fiancee’s journal for their son, 2008’s A Journal for Jordan: A Story of Love and Honor. Chante Adams plays Canedy, the fiancee is Michael B. Jordan, and the story has all the ingredients for a good cry. Now let’s see if it loads or hankies.

A JOURNAL FOR JORDAN: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Flash: baby feet. Flash: dog tags. Flash: Hands on a man’s back – I think two people are having sex? Hard to tell – like I said, “flash.” NEW YORK CITY, 2007. Dana is struggling mightily to be a full-time reporter at the New York Times and raise a toddler. She fights with her editor to stick with a story she’s putting together and fends off an arrogant co-worker who wants the byline when her personal life quite literally leaks into her professional one, via the breast milk stain on her blouse. She gets home and relieves the nanny and kisses wee Jordan as he naps and slumps on the floor and two seconds later the kid wakes up crying and she drags her butt off the carpet wearily. We hear you, girl, we hear you. That night she wakes gasping from a dream in which a man’s shadow profile gently hovers over her, whispering, then she opens her laptop and starts writing, presumably the book based on the journal that becomes this very movie.

Now it’s 1998. While visiting her parents in, I dunno, someplace that’s not NYC, she meets 1st Sergeant Charles Monroe King (Jordan). That’s how he introduces himself to her while standing in her parents’ living room, hanging a painting he made for them. Her dad was his drill sergeant and now Charles is a drill sergeant too. He’s going through a difficult divorce and her dad is one of his support pillars. Dana and Charles talk and go for a drive and put their feet in the pool at her hotel and now it’s the late 2000s again and Dana’s little boy looks at a photo of Sergeant Charles Monroe King, hovering over his stroller with red balloons behind him. Yes, that’s his daddy.

Then the movie starts working its way to the scene in which that photo is taken, except when it’s jumping to 2018 when Jordan (Jalon Christian) is 12 or 13. It keeps jumping around like that, and if it didn’t do that, it wouldn’t need to keep deploying terrible dialogue like “it’s been three weeks” and “it’s been six months,” and for a minute, we appreciate the unconventional narrative but it’s not long before we wish this thing would just drive the damn story straight down the road.

Anyway, back in the late ’90s, Charles and Dana racked up what had to be ASTRONOMICAL long-distance phone bills – hey, remember long-distance phone bills? – as they long-distance-relationship’d their way through life: Her rewarding journo career (Canedy won a Pulitzer in 2001, but the movie isn’t interested in that, and doesn’t mention it) and his military career, which has him here for a while and there for another while, and then it’s 9/11 and then it’s the mid-2000s, although I think the movie reverses the timeline of those two things. Regardless, in the mid-2000s, he finds out he’s getting sent to Iraq, and she wants to have a baby, and he proposes, and they have the kid and she buys him a journal so he can write his story and share advice to the baby, and did they ever set a wedding date? And then it’s 2018 and a friend gives Dana a vibrator for her birthday, and when Jordan walks in the room she says it’s a massager, which is technically true. It continues, life, this life, these lives, although not along the linear timeline we’re used to, and eventually the movie tries to make us cry.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Journal is very much in line with the earnest, straightforward tone of Washington’s other directorial BOATS efforts, Antwone Fisher and The Great Debaters.

Performance Worth Watching: Fruitvale Station, Creed and Just Mercy established Michael B. Jordan as the reigning King of Earnestness, and he’s therefore perfectly suited for this role. But it’s a classic case of a screenplay not giving him enough to do beyond standing around and looking glum and/or quietly smoldering.

Memorable Dialogue: Dana calls out Charles’ level of commitment to her and the Army:

Charles: I love you.

Dana: No, you love your men. I’m just better looking.

Sex and Skin: Brief lady toplessness in shadow during PG-13 lovemaking scenes; plenty of shirtless Michael B. Jordan.

Our Take: A Journal for Jordan is not a particularly good movie, but it made me pretty sad and damp about the eyeballs anyway. Does that count? I’m not sure that counts. The movie’s final moments successfully inspire one into secreting hot salty cryjuice, but once our wits return, it becomes clear that the film just mechanically manipulated us with images of folded American flags, weeping children and scarred war veterans, things that only assembly-line robots would find unmoving.

Which isn’t to say Washington is exploiting anything – the movie is well-intentioned, serious of mind and sincere as the day is long. It’s just stiff in tone and structurally convoluted, both at the expense of our involvement with the characters’ inner lives. When the film isn’t trying to cover 20 years of Dana’s life, we get long, drawn-out passages of stillness broken by the protagonists’ sober declarations of love or mild arguments about the usual stuff of life that in some movies is fascinating in their detail – detail that illuminates the distinctiveness of people, or plays chords that ring true in our own lives – but here is rendered shallow and flavorless.

There’s little humor here, or opportunities for us to get swept into Dana and Charles’ moments of joy or tragedy. The interesting fodder goes unexplored: Dana has a potentially racial-patriarchal hangup at work that just gets breezed over; her issues over having a relationship with a drill sergeant like her father is a talking point for 30 seconds. Jordan has little to do beyond standing around and looking stoic; we know very little about Charles beyond his love for the military, classic soul music and working out until he looks sculpted like an action figure. It works its way through the rote birth scene, the rote deployed-dad-sees-his-child-for-the-first-time scene, the rote phone-call-that-we-know-is-coming scene and many other sentimental cliches, and it’s like watching a software update scroll across your screen, inevitable and feeling too long, until it’s done.

Our Call: SKIP IT. A Journal for Jordan boasts a lot of talent behind and in front of the camera, but it never catches fire dramatically.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com.

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