131 min | PG-13 | December 25, 2021 | Columbia Pictures
A soldier fills a journal with everything he knows for the infant son he is leaving behind. Denzel Washington adapts that true story into a film that feels everything for you so you do not have to. The movie does the crying so the audience never has to start.
Charles King is an Army first sergeant and Dana Canedy is a New York Times editor. They fall in love, build a life, and have a son before King deploys to Iraq. He keeps a journal for the boy he barely gets to know, filling it with everything he wants the child to learn. A Journal for Jordan adapts Dana Canedy’s memoir into a story about grief and the words a father leaves behind. The real subject is how a child reads a dead parent into existence. The film keeps settling for a greeting card instead.
Michael B. Jordan plays Charles King with stillness and restraint. He carries military bearing into ordinary rooms, and his strongest moments come when discipline and tenderness occupy the same gesture. The romance asks him to embody a fantasy of decency, and he plays the fantasy rather than a man. Chanté Adams plays Dana Canedy with more friction, giving her an ambition and impatience the script keeps smoothing over. Jalon Christian plays the older Jordan as a watchful boy hunting for a father in a notebook. Robert Wisdom grounds the family scenes as Dana’s father, Sgt. T.J. Canedy, the one character allowed to be difficult.
Denzel Washington directs his fourth feature and Virgil Williams writes the screenplay. The structure cuts between Dana’s widowed present and the courtship that preceded it, but the editing flattens both timelines into the same soft register. Washington stages the love story in warm, unbroken light that drains it of tension. Every scene announces its emotion before the actors can earn it. The score swells on cue to tell the audience how to feel. Washington directed Antwone Fisher and Fences with a sharper sense of when to withhold, and that restraint is missing here.
The true story underneath this film is genuinely moving. A man writes down everything he knows for a son he expects to leave behind, and the son grows up reading it. The material does not need amplification. Washington amplifies it anyway, scoring every tear and holding on every embrace until the sentiment curdles. A Journal for Jordan honors its subjects and forgets to trust them.