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"He Got Game" Movie Review

Holding Court Spike Lee Mixes Basketball and Religion on a Coney Island Set

by Richard B. Woodward

If Catholics and Baptists need extra reasons to boycott Disney, and one can never have too many, they might want to check out Spike Lee's new baseball cap. The logo on the crown for He Got Game, his first film for Disney, seems designed with an apoplectic Cardinal O'Connor in mind.

Featuring an orange basketball on the arms of a white crucifix against a red background--a Spalding transfigured on a field of Bulls' blood--the iconography of The Passion According to St. Spike is cruder than the sleek polysemous emblem he chose for advertising X. But what it lacks in elegance, it makes up for in blasphemy.

The director was sporting the funky lid recently as he finished shooting New York locations for the film. He Got Game is both a religious parable and the Brooklyn basketball movie Lee has wanted to make for years. Set in the projects around Coney Island, the plot revolves around Jesus Shuttlesworth, the No. 1 high school hoop star in the nation. Played by real-life pro guard Ray Allen, this swishin' and dishin' Jesus is burdened with expectations that he is the financial savior of both his family and his hood. Hounded by every college coach in America as well as by a pack of sleazebag agents urging him to enter the NBA draft, he must make a decision affecting everyone he knows, one that could be worth $100 million.

''He's a bank,'' as Lee puts it. Everyone feels they have a friend in Jesus, including his girlfriend, his uncle, aunt, and cousin, his high school coach, even the warden and governor who have the power to commute his father's jail sentence. (This dubious jailhouse twist, with Denzel Washington playing the dad, sounds like a starring role written in to secure studio financing.)

The casting of NBA and college personages in cameos turned He Got Game into Lee's own fantasy basketball camp. Players Rick Fox, Vin Baker, Walter McCarty, Travis Best, and John Wallace hoop it up in action sequences while coaches Rick Pitino, Jim Boeheim, Roy Williams, Clem Haskins, John Thompson, George Karl, and Bobby Cremins play themselves. The original ''Black Jesus,'' ex-Knick Earl Monroe, is listed as basketball adviser. Lee even granted screen time to nemesis Reggie Miller and to the overexposed Shaq (''his best acting to date,'' Lee jibes).

But the movie rests on the performance of Ray Allen. The former U. Conn. phenom, now a sharpshooter for the Milwaukee Bucks, is an unlikely lead, never having starred in a national ad spot, much less a feature film. With his low-burn intensity and good looks, however, he can plausibly pass as Denzel's (tall) son.

''We wanted to find someone with outstanding basketball skills who could still look like a senior in high school,'' says Lee. ''And someone who would make this enormous commitment. It's a big thing, casting a nonactor as a lead. I wanted to be sure, Denzel wanted to be sure, Disney wanted to be sure. But people will be surprised by Ray's range.''

It is one mark of Allen's commitment that he came back to test for the part four or five times. Lee asked other young NBA millionaires to try out, but the agent for both Stephon Marbury and Kevin Garnett wouldn't allow a reading unless they were guaranteed the lead. Likewise, Allen Iverson wasn't interested.

(It's too bad that Marbury never had the chance to play this facsimile of himself. A memorable, hard-edged character in The Last Shot, Darcy Frey's exceptional work of sports journalism, he was the hope of his family and the C.I. projects as the star for Lincoln High in the early '90s. That Allen is playing Marbury can be seen as payback for the 1996 draft when the Timberwolves and Bucks traded lottery picks, and Stephon went one place ahead of Ray.)

On the set--the basketball courts behind Coney Island Houses on Surf Avenue--director and star sit through a couple of TV interviews, Allen obligingly setting off a fart bomb for the Fox cameraman. But he seems too shy for the publicity hustle. Sheathed in black Mecca gear, his lean frame folded into a director's chair, Allen plays with the enormous diamond-inlaid crucifix that hangs around his neck as he talks.

''I'm not a big jewelry person,'' he explains. ''But this last year when I finished the season, I met a guy who had some nice stuff and offered me a fair price. When Spike saw it, he thought it was great for the part.''

To get in shape for Jesus, Allen studied with acting teacher Susan Batson, rehearsing eight hours a day, six days a week, for eight weeks before principal cinematography began. ''It feels like I've been here all summer,'' he groans. Lee won't disclose Allen's salary, but it is fair to guess his daily wage for playing ball with famously frugal Disney worked out at about one-fifth of the roughly $2 million a year he is paid to suit up for the Bucks. The pay scale notwithstanding, he wouldn't trade the experience for anything.

''This was the hardest thing I've ever done,'' he says softly. ''I've learned a lot about myself from acting. Acting teaches you how to handle situations, how to tell people you love them--or hate them. I always keep my anger inside. And that's good. But I had to learn to let it go, too.''

''Athletes are taught to hide their feelings for the most part,'' Lee thinks. ''Acting was hard for Ray. We had to break down the wall that a lot of pro athletes put up to protect themselves. Ray had to go inside himself.''

In a blue-and-white Lincoln High uniform, Allen poses on a red-and-gold throne underneath a playground backboard in what may turn out to be the film's poster image. ''I bet I could beat you,'' says the photographer, a taunt designed to provoke and relax his subject. Allen raises an eyebrow, and the photographer quickly adds, ''If you had to play on your knees.''

Shouting another improbable boast, he claims from behind his viewfinder, ''I beat Michael Jordan once.''

''What was that, Nintendo or PlayStation?'' Allen counters with a momentary smile.

The asphalt park fills up as bench-sitters, rope-skippers, mothers and babies, and after-school hoopsters assemble for the uncommon sight of a movie being made in their midst. A passerby yells through the fence, ''Tell the truth, Spike, tell the truth.''

With the Coney Island throng hushed by the cry for quiet on the set, Lee directs a flashback scene: Shuttlesworth as a boy being teased about his name by a troop of kids, who bow down on the ground and mockingly intone, ''Save us, Jesus, save us.'' Lee runs more than 10 takes, not out of frustration but because the entire New York shoot has run more smoothly than anyone had anticipated.

His basketball-on-a-cross hat, already a sought-after accessory, stands out in the crowd as does the colorful item on the other end of his body--a flash pair of yellow Air Zooms. Lee may have forsworn the sports agent business; he looked into it a few years ago and found it ''too dirty.'' Rumors that he would team up with Johnnie Cochran to represent black athletes are ''ridiculous.''

But better than any other director, Lee understands how the vocabulary of designer names and corporate logos is the new lingua franca of the street. Naively, I ask if the pro players that appear in the film could wear whatever shoes they liked. ''No-o-o,'' he laughs. ''This is a Nike movie.''