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"He Got Game" Movie Review

Spike Lee's Hoop Dream Is Denzel's Slam Dunk

By Jack Mathews.

*** (three stars)

Denzel Washington does some of his best work as a prison inmate trying to earn himself an early release by talking his estranged son into playing basketball at the governor of New York's alma mater. With Ray Allen, Milla Jovovich.

Most of Spike Lee's movies have shown more ambition than talent, more passion than clarity, more audacity than good storytelling sense. He's the runt, in the parlance of his favorite pastime, who'd rather dunk than dribble, and when he misses - as he invariably does in each film - he misses big.

Never have those misses been more disappointing than they are in "He Got Game," an urban fable about a high school basketball prodigy and the people who would exploit him. It's disappointing because, in many ways, Lee's 12th feature is his best, and it's probably the one that most successfully matches him with his subject.

It's not Lee's courtside devotion to the New York Knicks nor his Nike basketball commercials that qualify him to tell the story, though his knowledge of the game certainly informs the backdrop. The basketball scenes, captured by cinematographer Malik Hassan Sayeed, have both athletic credibility and a fluid, poetic beauty. There's purity and perfection in this game, the images tell us. The rest is original sin.

"He Got Game" is about the "rest," the corruption that, like a colony of barnacles, attaches itself to a clean surface. Money-hungry agents, coaches, girlfriends, even family members. The bulk of Lee's films have played as counterattacks on white racism. Here, he grants us the right to assume, without having it shoved down our throats, that the racial divide in America is responsible for the exploitation of black inner-city athletes, and he takes dead aim at an even more insidious enemy: universal, colorless greed.

Lee isolates the purity of the game in a beautifully edited opening credit sequence, showing men, boys and girls, in basketball uniforms and street clothes - in one case, prison garb - shooting or driving toward the basket, to the accompaniment of Aaron Copland's spirited "John Henry." With exquisite dramatic pacing, Lee quickly introduces us to the story's two main characters, Coney Island basketball prodigy Jesus Shuttlesworth (Milwaukee Bucks guard Ray Allen), and his imprisoned father Jake (Denzel Washington).

Jake is about to get an offer he can't refuse. Seems the governor would like to see Jesus, the most hotly pursued high school player in the country, accept a scholarship to his alma mater, Big State University. Jake will be given a week's supervised furlough, and if he can convince Jesus to go to Big State in that time, the governor will commute Jake's sentence. Nothing in writing, mind you, just a promise conveyed through Attica's Warden Wyatt (Ned Beatty).

The problem is that Jake is doing time for killing his wife, Jesus' mother, and there's no forgiveness in the kid. The last thing he wants to do is help Jake, and the last thing he needs is another person trying to hitch a ride on his future. He's got college coaches chasing him, an uncle demanding that he share his presumed riches, a high school coach trying to shove agent money at him, and a girlfriend being paid to get him to turn pro. They all want a taste of his success, or, as Uncle Bubba (Bill Nunn) so colorfully puts it, "to wet my beak a little."

Casting dramatic athlete roles is always a problem. Cast a real player and you get honest athleticism with stiff acting. Cast an actor and you get a credible performance from someone who plays ball like your cousin Lorch. Given his fidelity to the game, Lee made the only choice he could, and Allen, a first-round NBA draft pick two years ago, is a sensation on the court.

But Jesus is one of Lee's most fully developed, and most dramatically demonstrative characters, and despite an often natural ease in front of the camera, Allen is badly outmatched by the pros around him - particularly by Washington, who gives one of the most riveting performances of his career.

Jake is a completely convincing character. In fact, the inspiration for him might have come from the real-life father of one of the two ghetto basketball stars followed from the playground to college in "Hoop Dreams." He was a great player himself, who missed or didn't have any opportunities of his own, and who lives vicariously through the talent encouraged in his son.

In this case, the encouragement is abusive. In the flashback sequences, we see the half-drunk Jake putting a pre-pubescent Jesus through a punishing drill on a street corner playground, then following him home to pound him for quitting.

It's almost axiomatic that behind every great athlete is an overbearing father - think of Tiger Woods and pere - and Jake plays that part with righteous zeal. If it weren't for the drunken outburst that results in the death of his wife (Lonette McKee), Jake and Jesus might be making the big decision about his future together.

This is a switch for Washington, who seems destined by his own intelligence and bearing to play cool, savvy professionals and men of conscience. In "He Got Game," he plays a man who's street-tough and cocky, and only discovers his conscience while trying to help himself. Because Jake can't get through Jesus' defenses, Lee lets us glimpse Jake's revelation through his tentative romance with Dakota (Milla Jovovich), the hooker who lives next door in the fleabag Coney Island hotel where the prison guards install him.

Lee's attempt to resolve the father-son conflict is an absolute botch, and the note of magical realism with which he ends the film is dreadful. Lee is hardly an adept sentimentalist, and this final image undermines much of the good work that's gone before.

For me, an even greater problem is the use of the late Aaron Copland's music as a dramatic score. The rap music by Public Enemy that's mixed in is appropriate, and for the first few minutes, the jaunty, symphonic sound of Copland's "John Henry" and "Appalachian Spring" almost feels inspired. But Lee's attempt to match the music to the scenes, while playing it too LOUD! (as he always does), becomes a recurrent distraction.

The film's great strength is the insight Lee brings to the process of college recruiting. He gets carried away at times, as he does when Jesus visits a campus that seems to be crawling with women from a Russ Meyer movie (what are these girls majoring in, "Baywatch"?), and where its evangelical coach (John Turturro, in another flashy cameo) has prepared a promotional reel comparing him to his namesake.

But there's painful truth beneath even these comic bits. A ghetto kid with talent is gruel for the American exploitation industry, and with so much at stake, for both the colleges and the NBA, no tool or temptation is off-limits to the recruiters. That point is made, with incidental irony, by the cameo appearances of more than a dozen famous college coaches, who ape themselves trying to recruit franchise players.

Their tone is amiably self-mocking, and Lee clearly intends no insult. But they're there for one reason: They're part of a process that is finally guided by colorless, universal greed.