Since the two characters meet in the late ’90s, we can make a pretty good guess as to what war that will happen in.
It is shadowed, however, by a sense of doom, since in the opening minutes of the film we learn that King was killed in action. It’s a happy story, if not without a tangle or two. The new movie is based on a memoir by the former New York Times reporter Dana Canedy, and in terms that are romantically glowing but not cloyingly starry-eyed, it tells the story of Canedy - ambitious, vivacious, emotionally solitary - and First Sergeant Charles Monroe King, the upright military man she met, fell in love with, and came out of her brainy shell to be with. It’s the fourth feature directed by Denzel Washington, and unlike his last one, the epic and lacerating “Fences” (2016), this one takes us back to the life-affirming feel-good middlebrow sincerity of his first two films as a director, “Antwone Fisher” (2002) and “The Great Debaters” (2007). Back in the 1980s, it would have been right down the middle of the plate. In a year-end movie landscape marked, on the one hand, by a stream of prestige adult dramas that struggle more than ever to find actual adults to see them, and on the other hand by the kind of oversize fantasy event films (“Spider-Man: No Way Home,” the upcoming “The Matrix Resurrections”) whose job it now is to keep the industry alive, “ A Journal for Jordan” feels like an odd movie out more than it might have, say, 20 years ago.