Hoop Dreams
Directed by Steve James
Produced by Peter Gilbert and Federick Marx
At Greater Union Cinemas
Reviewed by James Goodman
Arthur Agee and William Gates were ordinary black US 12-year-olds when the Hoop Dreams film crew entered their lives. Living in poverty amongst the concrete blocks of Chicago's east side, they and their parents dreamed of an escape route. For them, basketball offered the only route out of the ghetto schools and an impoverished black community and into the private colleges in white areas.
We follow Arthur and William as they are "spotted" by a freelancer and recruited by St Joseph's High on the west side while their parents scrape together the top-up fees. Arthur's father loses his job, turns to dealing and leaves the family home. Unable to pay Arthur's fees, we see his mother, Seila, trying to persuade St Joseph to at least give him a transcript of his results.
William suffers a knee injury and, after surgery, struggles to return to the game. Like Arthur, he falls back on his own and his family's faith in the "hoop dream".
They both inch their way back into the leagues and gain their passport to college education. Along the way, Arthur attends an all-US competition where Spike Lee addresses the players, telling them of the racism and exploitation embedded in the game. They know this and still chase their dream — they have little option.
The film has a bitter-sweet ending. There is no resolution of the difficult questions it raises. Hoop Dreams is no Hollywood feel-good movie. It is that rare thing — a "real lives" documentary.
The director and producers began filming in 1986 with a small grant for a half-hour documentary. Seven years later they had 250 hours of film. This was cut down to three hours of storyline — shot inside the home, on the basketball court and in schools, colleges and hospitals.
The mundane is interwoven with the profound. Birthday parties, knife-edge basketball games, the pressing poverty of life on the east side and the struggle to keep a household together give the story an intense immediacy. At the end of three hours, you wish the film makers had not cut so much out.
Hoop Dreams is an implicit and subtle metaphor for the "American dream". The way the film is now being used as a teaching aid in the US is itself a comment on this.
The message of personal responsibility and family unity has been taken up by "out-reach" community educators across the country. Chrysler, the car manufacturer, sponsors the "Hoop Dreams Challenge", which is designed to get the film shown to inner city teenagers. Teachers are encouraged to stimulate discussion of the issues of racism, drug dealing and teenage pregnancy that crop up in the film, and pupils are given a questionnaire that gets them to think of their life as a career.
But the film's "self-help" themes are not its main message. They are swamped by the bleak contrasts "across the tracks" in Chicago. As demonstrated so often, the "hoop dream" is a cruel distortion of reality. The route out of poverty is as narrow as it can get. Half a million compete in high school basket ball in the US, 14,000 get places in colleges on the strength of this, and 25 go on to compete for the National Basketball Association. In the last decade the NBA has become big business. There are profits to be made from basketball players — not least for the private colleges that can claim to "discover" them. The film shows how this corporate sector reaches right down into US society to shape aspirations, particularly of the poorest, from their earliest years.
But the film is no social commentary — it is primarily an emotional experience. Yet it does leave the nagging question ringing in your rears — without the dream, what would happen?