At her father’s encouragement, Dana makes up a story so that Charles, recently divorced, can give her a ride back to her hotel. A brief conversation reveals that he is the artist and a friend of her father. They met in the 90s when Dana stumbled upon Charles hanging a pointillist-style painting in her family’s home in Kentucky. Dana begins recounting the story of her and Charles’ first encounter. “You are just ten-months old now, but I am writing this for the young man you will be.” Just as soon as we have settled into the cadence of Dana’s life in 2007, A Journal for Jordan pulls us into the past. That night, she begins to write her memoir.
She devours its pages and reading them spurs her into action. But A Journal for Jordan isn’t that - at least not entirely.Īfter a long day at the office, Dana returns to her home on the Upper East Side and sifts through a box containing King’s uniform, photos, old birthday cards and a journal he wrote for their son.
It’s a moment that signals an interesting potential direction for the film: Perhaps this will be a quiet observation of a woman inspired to write letters to her son as a way of wading through grief and motherhood. During a particularly heated exchange with a white editor and reporter, the former points to her shirt, leaking with breastmilk. To be a Black single mother in a white industry is taxing, and everyone is worried about Dana, although she insists she is fine. The film holds nothing back in the first few minutes, plunging into Dana’s chaotic world, which includes graphic, fragmented nightmares of her partner’s death in combat, the deluge of cars during morning rush hour and fingers clacking on keyboards at the office. Dana (Chanté Adams) is struggling to balance her intense job as a reporter at the Times with being a single mother to a fussy toddler after Charles’ (Jordan) death. Screenwriters: Virgil Williams, Charles Monroe King (Based on the personal journal by), Dana Canedy (Based on the book by)Ī Journal for Jordan opens in 2007, a year before the memoir’s publication. Jordan, Chanté Adams, Jalon Christian, Robert Wisdom, Tamara Tunie, Jasmine Batchelor
Unfortunately, the poignant tale - rendered with precise language and vivid imagery even when it’s overly sentimental - loses some of its gracefulness in Denzel Washington’s screen adaptation.Ĭast: Michael B. King, a reserved man whom she admired and struggled to accept. Published in 2008, the book, addressed to Canedy’s son, Jordan, tells a heartbreaking story of how she fell in love with his father, First Sgt. The cloying romantic drama is based on a memoir of the same name by Dana Canedy, a former New York Times journalist and the current senior vice president and publisher at Simon & Schuster. But even scenes in which he saunters around shirtless, spontaneously starts doing pushups or flashes a coy smile aren’t enough to keep one fully engaged in A Journal for Jordan. Jordan, an actor whose face and physique confirm that God only smiles upon some of us. It’s hard to resist a film starring Michael B.
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