DIRECTOR/SCREENWRITER
Spike Lee
PRODUCERS
Jon Kilik
Spike Lee
CINEMATOGRAPHER
Malik Hassan Sayeed
MUSIC
Public Enemy
The Bomb Squad
EDITOR
Barry Alexander Brown
CAST
Denzel Washington (Jake Shuttlesworth)
Ray Allen (Jesus Shuttlesworth)
Milla Jovovich (Dakota Burns)
Rosario Dawson (Lala Bonilla)
Hill Harper (Coleman 'Booger' Sykes)
Zelda Harris (Mary Shuttlesworth)
Ned Beatty (Warden Wyatt)
Jim Brown (Spivey)
Bill Nunn (Uncle Bubba)
Thomas Jefferson Byrd (Sweetness)
Roger Guenveur Smith (Big Time Willie)
John Turturro (Coach Billy Sunday)
Lonette McKee (Martha Shuttlesworth)
Kim Director (Lynn)
Chasey Lain (Buffy)
Jennifer Esposito (Ms. Janus)
MPAA rating: R
Running
time: 136m
U.S. release: May 1, 1998
Video availability: VHS - DVD
other spike
lee joints
reviewed on this website:
- bamboozled
- clockers
- 4 little girls
- get on the bus
- inside
man
- malcolm x
- summer of sam
- 25th hour
|
Flawed
father figures are a recurring theme in Spike Lee's work. Think
of the pizzeria owner Sal and his two sons in Do the Right
Thing, the uncomprehending dads in Jungle Fever and
Get
On the Bus, the paternal but deadly crack lord Rodney
in Clockers,
the musician struggling to support his family in the autobiographical
Crooklyn. Lee has had a tempestuous relationship with
his own father, Bill Lee, a musician who scored Spike's early
films; when Bill Lee got busted for heroin possession, he invoked
his famous son's name to the police to get out of trouble.
He Got Game, Lee's new film and one of his finest, feels
like a reconciliation of sorts. The story of a screw-up father
and his superstar son, it's perhaps Lee's most personal film
since Crooklyn. Denzel Washington is Jake Shuttlesworth,
who's spent the last six years in Attica for murder. Jake is
offered a reduced sentence if he can persuade his son Jesus (Ray
Allen), a high-school hoop legend, to sign on with the governor's
preferred college basketball team. (Well, Jesus may get an education
there too, but that's considered beside the point.) The challenge
is that Jesus loathes his father and won't talk to him; he sees
Jake as one more vulture who smells cash.
The hyperbole surrounding Jesus gets to be so intense it's funny
-- though not for Jesus, whom Lee presents as a martyr for the
'90s. True to his name, Jesus is being tempted right and left,
and his indecision about which college he'll attend is his way
of avoiding, if you will, a crucifixion -- he won't be nailed
down. Movie directors as visible as Spike Lee has been may also
feel crucified by the media, betrayed by false friends who come
sniffing around for money (there's a montage of beggars who sound
like people Lee may have dealt with). Lee loves basketball, sees
it as a graceful way out of the projects for many African-Americans,
but he's also all too familiar with the pitfalls of the sports
culture -- you'll recall him in the great documentary Hoop Dreams
advising athletes to use their heads.
As a filmmaker, Lee only gets better. The great young cinematographer
Malik Hassan Sayeed, with whom Lee has worked since Clockers,
uses a saturated and gritty palette to give the images a hyper-realistic
texture. Lee doesn't push as hard for effects now; he's mellowed
-- Malcolm
X marked the beginning of a more mature and measured
style -- and He Got Game is a nimble and engaging work,
with important scenes that feel casual and tossed-off (that's
a big compliment). He has also, thank God, dropped his curious
habits of having people walk down a street as if they were being
pulled along on wheels, and shooting entire scenes through a
distorting lens (he uses that effect in just two well-chosen
shots here).
Casting the nonactor Ray Allen, a guard for the Milwaukee Bucks,
was a major risk that generally pays off. Allen is natural and
low-key, if sometimes a little too subdued in emotional scenes.
His achievement is that he holds his own with Denzel Washington,
who should work more often with Lee; with other directors, he
can be a tad stiff and inexpressive, as if refusing to yield
to the poor movies (like Virtuosity
and Fallen) he finds himself in. Lee, however, knows how
to deglamorize Washington, giving him the freedom to play noble
failures like Jake, with his bad 'fro and his way of making grilled-cheese
sandwiches with an iron. Washington's Jake is palpably sorrowful;
even his pride in his son is tempered with regret.
He Got Game climaxes with Spike Lee's version of the Big
Game in sports movies: Jake and Jesus face off on the court,
playing for Jake's future. Will Jesus do the right thing? In
the concluding scenes, Lee achieves his reconciliation in an
indirect way -- he tells us that even screw-up fathers can teach
their sons by being negative role models, examples of
what not to do. It's not much, but it's something. The final
sequence (which I won't reveal) isn't meant to be taken literally;
Lee is saying that the ball is in Jesus' court, and that it's
up to him to be the man his father couldn't be. In real life,
Lee isn't only a disappointed son now; he's also a father himself,
and the movie may be his acknowledgment that fatherhood is never
easy. |
