Never known to make a boring movie in his twelve year feature film career, writer/director Spike Lee has one again delivered a compelling picture with "He Got Game." As much a story about father son relationships as it is about basketball, this film is often brilliant, nearly always good, and only suffers from a few questionable moments that keep it from being a truly great film.
Loaded from the onset with a great deal of background story, the film opens with a great cross country montage of young basketball players from all walks off life. Featuring impressive slow motion footage of the leaping, spinning, and jumping players and the slowly spinning ball heading toward the hoop, the montage not only shows Lee's great love and admiration of the game, but it also immediately grabs the audience and takes them along for the ride. Featuring a fun score by the late composer Aaron Copland, this sequence is quite effective.
In fact most of the beloved composer's included score works quite well, but there are a few moments that don't. This isn't intended to sound racist because it has nothing to do with skin color and instead locale, but Copland's well-known "Rodeo: 'Hoe Down" doesn't fit at all with an inner-city, outdoor basketball game. Reminding one of America's heartland of days gone by, the piece would work in period films like "Hoosiers" or "The Natural" (the Redford baseball film that did feature a Copland inspired Randy Newman score), but not in this particular setting. It's a minor objection, but since the music is featured so prominently in several scenes, it's questionable why Lee decided to buck its stereotype.
On the other hand, Lee uses a fun variety of shooting and editing styles to always keep the story moving and make it constantly interesting. A shot that zooms in to a newspaper photo suddenly becomes the active scene itself, and while a warden talks about some parole officers who are to escort Jake, we see that scene as he talks. Much of the film is shot this way and it gives the picture a welcomed complexity over the standard issue, cookie cutter films that don't even attempt anything nearing ingenuity.
It's the story and the resulting performances, however, that really make the film take off, but also ultimately cause a few momentum problems. On the positive side, and as stated earlier, the movie comes pre-loaded with a great deal of back story and thus we're thrust right into the middle of a story that's nearing its completion.
The plot concept -- a convict father must convince his estranged son, now the most wanted high school basketball player in the country, to help him get out of prison early -- sounds like the typical "high concept" story so often used to sell scripts that often turn into boring or horrible films. While it is high concept -- meaning that one sentence can perfectly explain the film -- Lee adds so many layers of complexity to it that it reaches beyond its simple description.
What really makes the movie fly is the tremendous performance from Academy Award winner Denzel Washington ("Glory," "Malcolm X"). This accomplished actor easily could have played his character as the good guy who was wrongly sent to prison and then sweet talks his way back into his estranged son's life. Instead, he creates a flawed and completely believable guy who made a tragic mistake in his life -- that ruined it and his relationship with his kids -- but who still wants to make sure his son does the right thing.
While Jake is basically a likeable guy -- he feels compelled to help a wayward prostitute -- he has enough rough edges to make him real. Seeing him give his young son heavy doses of "tough love" in flashback as he pushes and teaches the boy to his limits, one identifies with Jake's hopes for his son, but also feels uncomfortable about the way he's going about it. Then, when the present day father and son play each other one last time, the effect is quite moving not only as a fitting culmination to the story, but also in how the father son relationship has evolved.
Rookie professional basketball player Ray Allen makes his feature film acting debut as that son. While he does a good job, there are a few rough moments (such as when he and his younger sister discuss fame and fortune that comes off as awkward and quite wooden) that show his inexperience. Of course Lee even states that it was a risky move using a real ball player in the part, but the tradeoff of is that he got some fabulous and completely realistic basketball scenes.
A bigger problem for Allen's performance, however, is that his character is under such pressure that he often comes off as unlikeable, a fact that doesn't help Allen, but that also hurts the story as we don't really root for this kid. In fact, Lee pushes the whole plot element dealing with Jesus and everybody trying to take advantage of him to such a hackneyed level that it nearly becomes ludicrous after a while. Although such moments obviously occur in real life as young talents are seen only as dollar figures to the movers and shakers in the sport, the fact that everyone here wants a piece of the action eventually becomes unrealistic.
It also puts too much of a heavy dramatic emphasis on the decision that Jesus finally makes -- as if the world might end if he makes the wrong one (Let's see, do I pick a full athletic scholarship to college A, or university B, or do I just choose to make several million a year with the pros? Hmmm, decisions, decisions). While there is some dramatic weight to his dilemma -- about whether he'll ultimately help his dad or not -- the fact that we don't really care too much about him doesn't help.
Another part of the film that feels forced and unnecessary is the whole element of Jake befriending Dakota, the wayward prostitute. Although it shows that Jake is a nice guy in wanting to help her (that eventually, however, is just a way for him to release some pent up sexual tension), the moments don't really do anything for the story and seem more like filler between scenes of Jesus visiting college campuses and meeting with agents.
Then there's the sudden, but quite brief inclusion that Jesus got Lala pregnant in the past and that she had an abortion. Such moments are unnecessary and detract from the much more involving scenes featuring Jake trying to reconcile with his son. Surprisingly, though, Washington doesn't have as big a part as most people probably imagine (it's still considerable, but he's not the continual number one focus). When he's there, however, the movie really takes off.
A scene where he embraces his wife's headstone in a cemetery is moving, and there are a few subtly funny moments such as after his daughter mentions that she got an "A" in science for studying cells, he says that he's done that as well. And when a shoe store clerk sees the prison tracking collar on his leg, Jake comments that it's for his arthritis. The clerk responds that his brother has the same thing and that it must be going around Coney Island and Jake agrees that it's contagious.
Although the film's split story -- Jake trying to make amends while Jesus deals with the pressure from everyone around him -- makes it more complex and interesting, the fact that it continually shifts back and forth ultimately diffuses any momentum either of the sides was building. The end result is that the film occasionally feels incoherent, which is too bad because it features so many brilliant moments and decent performances.
While it's still quite a good film, one only wishes that Lee had omitted a few elements and tightened the script just a bit to avoid some of the melodramatic artifacts. Even so, it's certainly easy to watch and if anything, Lee deserves kudos for not ending it with the stereotypical championship basketball game that's decided with the last shot as time runs out. For that, Lee gets our heartfelt appreciation and his film, "He Got Game" gets a 7.5 out of 10.
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