April 30–May 7, 1998

movies

He Got Game

Spike and Denzel take on the NBA.

Written and directed by Spike Lee
A Touchstone Pictures Release

by Cindy Fuchs

According to a recent Entertainment Weekly, the highest-grossing documentary of all time is Hoop Dreams. With a running time of nearly three hours, it was cut down from hundreds of hours of footage documenting the lives of two Chicago boys hoping to make it to the NBA. Its success was a surprise, but calculated nonetheless: it was a well-marketed, well-distributed and well-crafted drama. If nothing else came across in Hoop Dreams, its primary point was this: the NBA is serious, big business. As Spike Lee underlined for a squad of basketball campers in the film, it's a business premised on wealthy white men exploiting brilliant talent and physical grace, mostly found in bodies of color. Watch yourself, he warned the boys. Don't be fooled into thinking the rich men actually like you or care about what happens to you, except to the extent that your fate affects their profits.

Now Lee has written and directed his own fictional and didactic version of this drama, with an ending that is at once happier and sadder than the one in Hoop Dreams. He Got Game follows the troubled relationship between a high school basketball superstar, Jesus Shuttlesworth (played by Milwaukee Bucks guard Ray Allen, in his acting debut), and his estranged father, Jake (Denzel Washington). Incarcerated at Attica for murdering his wife (played in aggravatingly nostalgic flashbacks by a luminous Lonette McKee), Jake is offered a possible early parole by an unseen governor if he can convince number one draft pick Jesus to sign with the governor's alma mater, the pointedly named Big State. Hoping to reconcile with his son, Jake accepts the assignment, for which he is given one week on the outside, overseen by a couple of hard-ass parole officers (Jim Brown and Joseph Lyle Taylor) and wearing an ankle monitor that displays his status for anyone who's paying attention. The outside is specifically Coney Island, which gives Lee a massively symbolic canvas. And you know he makes the most of it, aided by his production designer Wynn Thomas and cinematographer Malik Hassan Sayeed, who also shot Girl 6 and Clockers, using similar mixes of film and video stocks, and lots of restless zooms and pans. Repeated shots of Ferris wheels, boardwalks and neon signs, combined with street corners busy with deals and graffitied walls, create a continuum of romance and monotony, desperation and hope. Such distinctive exteriors, along with the cramped interiors like Jake's cell, his seedy hotel room (invaded by neon-sign flashes at all hours) and the small apartment Jesus shares with his sister Mary (the irrepressible Zelda Harris, who starred in Crooklyn), externalize characters' states of mind, which range from confusion to anger to frustration to elation. These fleeting and changeable moods are made fabulously visible (and there are only two brief moments where Lee's signature techniques threaten to distract—once when Jake's face is made skinny by a fancy lens and once, during the closing credits, when that tracking-on-the-sidewalk business makes Jesus float).

The focus on Jesus and Jake's difficulties is familiar, and the women characters again fall by the wayside, serving as means to express the men's moral and life dilemmas. Jesus has to decide where to go and how to manage his extraordinary gift: For the week that Jake is out, Jesus is besieged by pro scouts and college coaches making offers of snazzy cars and big-breasted girls, and hounded by his uncle (Bill Nunn) and girlfriend (Rosario Dawson) to make a deal that will benefit each of them (not to mention that Jesus' predicament is made relentlessly public, on TV and in sports pages). Jake, of course, has his own problems, being a once-ambitious local b-baller himself and now regretting his drunken, accidental killing of his perfect wife. Torn between his desire to make that parole and his desire to support and advise his son for real, Jake makes periodic appearances, which make for engaging scenes between Washington and Allen (who turns in a solid performance as a high school teen).

In between these visits, Jake spends his time rescuing the hooker who's in the room next door. He first sees Dakota (Milla Jovavich) as she's being abused by her goosey-necked pimp (Thomas Byrd Jefferson). She's addicted and delusional, scrawny so she looks ill, plus she has the movie-hooker's mandatory heart of gold. Jake's interest in her is engendered at first by his good nature, then by his guilt over the dead wife (here's a girl he can save, precisely because she's not like his independent-thinking and solidly supportive wife, precisely because she's a helpless and undemanding white girl), and then by his lack of sex during his years inside. The sex scene delivers a measure of audience-pleasing redemption for Jake, and sets up his further salvation, achieved by his rescue of Jesus. The film's climax comes in a one-on-one neighborhood court contest, slow-motioned and drawn out to an unsurprising conclusion. To highlight the moment's significance (in case you've somehow missed it), the game is accompanied by a big-showy Aaron Copland composition.

In fact, Copland fills up much of the film's soundtrack (with gargantuan tunes like "John Henry,'' "Billy the Kid,'' "Rodeo: Hoe-Down''), and the rest of the score is by Public Enemy (with appearances by KRS-One and Wu Tang's Masta Killa, and a sample from Stephen Stills' "For What It's Worth"). The schizzy effect of these two soundtrack halves suggests the film's more general difficulty, which is the split between its obvious good politics (in arguing that prisoners, basketball players and prostitutes are all mere cogs in a money machine that has none of their interests at heart) and its obvious sensational devices. The most effective moments don't come with flashy scoring or camera moves. The most effective moments are small, when Lee lets his fine actors do their work without all the (movie) business.