He Got Balls
Basketball! It's played amid
the cornfields of the Midwest by lanky boys with flaxen hair and 'twixt the
housing projects by the troubled shores of Coney Island, where otherwise
powerless young African-Americans bestride the courts like colossi. Basketball!
The young gods swivel, unwind, suspend themselves in air, the orange orb that
spins from their fingers as splendid for an instant as the sun, until it
drops--swish!--through nets like filigree to the earth from whence it sprung.
Basketball! So lyrically American you can almost hear the dissonant yearnings
of Aaron Copland. Wait a minute, that is Aaron Copland--a gay, white Jew
on the soundtrack of a Spike Lee movie! The opening montage of He Got
Game leaves no doubt as to the mythopoetic intentions of its fiercely
enterprising director: Basketball, not baseball, is the pastime of the nation
Lee inhabits. And He Got Game is poised to be Lee's Great
African-American Myth, a tale that encompasses the tragedies of the past, the
turbulence of the present, the messianic longings of the future.
So much
ambition, dynamism, visual energy, bullshit. I confess: I come to a Spike Lee
"joint" with suspicion, prepared to fight off the propaganda, to sort through
the messages and scrutinize the codes. The hope is always there, though, that
Lee will transcend his anger and egotism and paranoia and make a film that
feels organic--that doesn't add up to another sterling specimen of the "Watch
That Man Cook!" school of movie making, in which razzle-dazzle outshines
content and the auteur upstages his own work. It's a testament to Lee's talent
that, hobbled as he is by a chip on his shoulder the size of a planet and
aspirations often laughably outsized, he has managed to make a film as
entertaining as He Got Game . Uneven, ludicrous, but--oh man!--fun to
watch. He got balls.
The picture has one of the oldest pulp plots in the
business, last used to rousing effect in John Carpenter's Escape From New
York (1981): A convict is sprung from prison, promised liberty by an
untrustworthy government in return for accomplishing a morally ambiguous task
that no one else can do, given a strict deadline, and ruthlessly monitored by
his ex-captors. Here the convict is Jake Shuttlesworth (Denzel Washington), and
his mission is to go into the projects of Coney Island, where his son Jesus
(played by the 22-year-old Milwaukee Bucks guard Ray Allen) is a high-school
basketball player of near divine abilities. Jake must convince his son to sign
a letter of intent that he'll enroll in Big State University, the state
governor's alma mater. The obstacles, however, are formidable. Jesus is
currently under siege by coaches, agents, and their unsavory minions, all of
whom proffer money, cars, sex, and sundry other illegal inducements to sign
with their colleges or professional teams. More of an obstacle still is the
relationship between father and son, which has been poisoned by the death of
the young man's mother under circumstances that Lee keeps cunningly under wraps
until the movie's galvanic climax, in which the two men go mano a mano
on the basketball court.
This is
sure-fire material, and Lee structures it deftly, leaving us in the dark until
the end as to why Jake--a manifestly decent, soft-spoken, cagey fellow,
gorgeously underplayed by Washington--ended up in prison in the first place.
Meanwhile, He Got Game teems with ... stuff. Lee's syntax can be
legitimately labeled Brechtian. The narrative is incessantly interrupted by
cinematic placards, exhortations, lectures about staying in school (in the form
of letters from the boy's dead mother, played by Lonette McKee), and inserts
depicting the evils of drugs and alcohol. The characters are photographed
iconically, as in an Eisenstein film: the spiritually crippled black dad with
his modest Afro against the weather-beaten relic of a Coney Island ride, for
example. Lee, who has started his own advertising firm and is noted for his
hyperbolic Nike commercials, is always selling something (I pat myself on the
back for titling my Village Voice review of Lee's 1986 first feature,
She's Gotta Have It , "Birth of a Salesman"), and his work is never
sharper than when his characters are selling something, too--delivering some
kind of spiel as if their very existences depended on it. (Some of the spielers
here include real NCAA and NBA coaches, along with a hilarious mock-religious
turn by John Turturro as Coach Billy Sunday.)
Supersensitive to criticism these days, Lee has
built in all kinds of protections against charges of racism and misogyny. A
preening Italian-American sports agent (Al Palagonia) declares that he has no
mob ties and that he resents being stereotyped, shortly before delivering a
stereotypical (and very funny, Scorsese-esque) recitation of the luxuries
(Ferraris, Rolexes, mansions) that await Jesus if he signs on the dotted line.
Lala Bonilla (Rosario Dawson), the amusingly named Delilah dispatched to seduce
the young star, gets a monologue near the end in which she justifies her
actions on socioeconomic grounds. And, as a counterpoint to all the luscious,
bare-breasted white girls used to tempt the hero into playing for the Man,
there's a hooker (the model Milla Jovovich, the film's most unlikely bit of
casting, made to look like a near albino) who's exploited and knocked around by
a jittery black pimp (Thomas Jefferson Byrd) so sadistic that if this film had
been made by a white director he'd have been cited (most likely by Lee) as a
flagrant racist outrage. As on a basketball, the seams of the movie show.
Stanley
Crouch (who gleefully refers to Lee as "the diminutive director") has pointed
out that Lee resembles the hero of Preston Sturges' Sullivan's Travels ,
a lightweight who strives to make an unwieldy epic called O Brother, Where
Art Thou? (Actually, this joke was first made by E. Max Frye in his
underrated 1993 farce Amos &
Andrew , in which a Spike-like
playwright has a Broadway hit called Yo Brother, Where
Art Thou? )
Lee's use of Copland pieces such as "Lincoln Portrait," "Rodeo," "Appalachian
Spring," and "Fanfare for the Common Man" too transparently pump up the
picture's already pumped-up visuals, and his b-ball variation on the
religioso finale of Lars von Triers' Breaking the Waves (1996) is
as daft as it was in the original.
What transforms He Got Game is Lee's love for the
sport and his intimacy with its nuances. Spike knows basketball. He filmed in
and around Brooklyn's Lincoln High, which is also the setting of Darcy Frey's
superb book The Last Shot: City Streets, Basketball Dreams , an equally
panoramic but more grounded portrait of the game's meaning to the denizens of
the Coney Island projects. Lee might view the sport as a metaphor--as both a
way out and a trap for young African-Americans--but he never lets the metaphor
gum up the realities of the game. On the contrary, the metaphor intensifies the
action on the court, which can seem kinetic to the point of spontaneous
combustion, as pressure to perform tears families up and turns black man
against black man. If, on occasion, Lee's serpentine camera seems more active
than the players he's shooting, he knows just when to speed the play up, when
to slow it down, and when to let it unfold in real time. And he gets a charming
performance from Allen, who, in his acting debut, occupies his pedestal with
grace and diffidence. The "diminutive director" never evinces more stature than
when he's looking up in awe.
