MOVIE REVIEW: Slaying Goliath

POSTED: Friday, May 14, 2010, 9:00 PM

Filed Under: Movies Movie Review

Slaying Goliath, a portrait of a 10 days in the life of an Amateur Athletics Union basketball team and their emotionally fraught trip to the AAU National Championships, seems like a straightforward documentary. It is and it isn't: Directors Michele Stephensen and Joe Brewster aren't just a husband-and-wife filmmaking team doing another project here, they're also the parents of a fifth-grade boy who just happens to play for the team. As Stephensen and Brewster admitted after Tuesday's screening at International House, they knew their son's team had some drama, so they figured they'd take their cameras along as they joined the rest of the parents on the team's drive down to Cocoa Beach, Florida. They got some drama alright: A 24-year-old coach with an anger problem, a team of kids who have trouble coaslescing as a team and, throughout it all, a bunch of parents fighting over what to do about everything. Needless to say, things fall apart: There are tears, there are losses (but also a few wins) and the team goes home — apparently never to play together again, as Stephensen and Brewster explained after the screening. Unfortunately, what's missing is a lot of important contextual information. How do the filmmakers fit into all the parental bickering? What do they really think of the team and its coach, and how do they feel about their son's role on the team? What happened before the tournament, and what happened afterwards? Considering how close the filmmakers were to the material, I would have liked to see some kind of personal reflection. They aren't interested in making the kind of reflective, personal film that would answer those questions, and on some level, that's fine. They chose to make an objective documentary — a short, tightly edited film that seems balanced in its depiction of the team's coach, players and other parents. However, these are parents with a huge personal investment in their son's team, and whatever "balance" the film appears to must be artificial, in the sense that the filmmakers almost certainly have their own opinions. Those opinions don't come out in Slaying Goliath as blatantly as they could have, and I can't see how they could do anything but make for a richer film with a more nuanced story to tell.

Posted by Sam Kaplan @ 9:00 PM Permalink | Post a comment

Comments (0)

Behind the scenes of local film A Man Full of Trouble
What we're trying to do this weekend
CONCERT REVIEW: The Postal Service @ The Mann 6/17
ICEPACK ILLUSTRATED: Sunny, Tony and the return of Do No Harm
NOW SEE THIS: Salinger film trailer
ICEPACK ILLUSTRATED: Indian fare rules, Dunder Mifflin lives on, Tom Jones is a god
CONCERT PHOTOS: The National/Dirty Projectors @ The Mann Center 6/7
REVIEW: Archer Live! @ the TLA 1/11
CITY PAPER WRITING CONTEST 2013: Send stories! Send poetry!
ICEPACK ILLUSTRATED: Pink. Diner en Blanc 2. Breaking Glass and Milkboy at the movies. And so on.

About this blog

Featuring everything from event roundups to concert reviews and sex talk, City Paper's Critical Mass is a space for off-the-wall coverage of Philly's A&E scene.

Follow Critical Mass editors Patrick Rapa and Emily Guendelsberger on Twitter:

@mission2denmark | @emilygee

Search this blog:

Topics:

Blog archives:

June
May
April

March
February
January

Past Archives: