Film
Cinema Resdiscovered: Hoop Dreams + intro
It’s notoriously difficult to get Brits to watch American sports movies, and a three-hour basketball documentary would appear to present an insurmountable marketing challenge. But Steve James’ exceptional, Oscar nominated Hoop Dreams is only about basketball in the sense that, say, Fever Pitch is about football.
The film follows five years in the lives of two black Chicago teenagers for whom the game represents a potential ticket out of the ghetto, an escape from drugs, gangs and relentless poverty. In 1987, 14-year-old Arthur Agee is recruited on a partial scholarship by St. Joseph’s, a private Catholic school, which is the alma mater of his idol, NBA superstar Isiah Thomas. At the same school we find William Gates (not that one), who’s already being tipped as “the next Isiah Thomas” by coach Gene Pingatore: a chubby, somewhat reptilian man whose job hinges upon luring and nourishing talented youths, then ditching them ruthlessly if they fail to make the grade.
Arthur’s success delights his mother and is enjoyed vicariously by his junkie father, who once had NBA ambitions of his own. But his progress is slow. When both parents lose their jobs, he’s unceremoniously kicked out and winds up back at an all-black inner city school. William, whose greater talent means he pays nothing for his education, has problems of his own caused by a recurrent knee injury and his failure to attain the academic grades necessary to pursue his basketball career at college.
is needed now More than ever
This is no polemic. Indeed, the only note of agit-proppery comes in the form of a brief appearance by Spike Lee, who reminds a roomful of high school recruits that the whole game revolves around money. But the gentle observational style and remarkable access to his subjects’ lives negotiated by James reveals much about the deprivation, desperation and exploitation that fuels the ‘American Dream’. By the end, you find yourself caring about these people in a way that it’s impossible to care about the fictional creations of those feelgood sports movies with which Americans traditionally flatter themselves.
Cinema Rediscovered‘s UK premiere of the 25th anniversary digital restoration is introduced by writer, curator and broadcaster Adam Murray (Come The Revolution, Cables & Camera, Ujima).
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