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WSWS : Arts Review : Film Reviews

1994 Toronto International Film Festival

Hoop Dreams: Something approaching reality for a change

By David Walsh
10 October 1994

Hoop Dreams, a film by Steve James, Frederick Marx and Peter Gilbert, follows two black teenagers from poverty-stricken neighborhoods in Chicago over the course of four and a half years as they pursue their ambition to be stars in the National Basketball Association. The documentary film says a good deal about this country, both about its economic and moral states.

At 14, Arthur Agee and William Gates are recruited off the playgrounds and offered financial support to attend St. Joseph's, a Catholic high school in suburban Westchester, Illinois. Gates fares relatively well at St. Joseph's, although a knee injury hampers his playing. Agee, from one of Chicago's roughest projects, has a more difficult time adjusting. The film implies that his resultant financial difficulties at the school would never have arisen if he had had more success on the basketball court. As it is, he is forced to leave and enroll in a public high school, Marshall, where he excels once again.

The film introduces the spectator to an entire cast of characters, among them: the mothers of William and Arthur, struggling with economic hardship and family pressures; Arthur's father, "Bo," who, after being laid off twice, becomes a crack addict for a time; William's brother, Curtis, who entertained basketball ambitions himself, but is now stuck in a dead-end job; St. Joseph's coach Gene Pingatore, who comes across as a typical representative of the coarse, pragmatic coaching fraternity; Isiah Thomas, who along with filmmaker Spike Lee, speak for the selfish black petty bourgeoisie; and Frank Du Bois, the director of the Nike basketball camp, who says bluntly, "It's a meat market, and we're trying to serve the best meat we can."

For this reviewer, the ups and downs of the two adolescents' careers, the outcomes of even the most decisive games, are less compelling than the traumas one observes taking place at the margin, so to speak, of the film. The enormous accomplishment of the filmmakers is that in the difficulties of the Agee family in particular, they have captured the common experience of an entire section of the working class. The loss of decent jobs, increasing poverty, bad housing, utility shutoffs and drug abuse--these have been the everyday experiences of masses of people and they have gone virtually undepicted in film or television.

The filmmakers also reveal very specifically how the ruthless profit-driven system of sports is effecting youth at an increasingly young age, how, in the words of Frederick Marx, "it puts them through the mill before they even have a chance of knowing who they are."

Perhaps those youth who are the most likely to devote themselves to an athletic career have a predisposition to a single-minded individualism. That being said, the most disturbing aspect of the film, which is attributable to the present debased social climate, is that everyone in it accepts the notion that success or failure in life is the individual's responsibility. What about the kids without basketball talent? They fall into an abyss, like Arthur's friend, Shannon Johnson. No one who makes an appearance in the film suggests any sort of alternate way out of the poverty and hardship--through a social struggle, for example--or a rejection of the entire brutal sports industry set-up. In that sense, the film is also significant for what is absent.

"An antidote to the stereotypes that we've been fed for years"

An interview with Frederick Marx, one of the directors of Hoop Dreams

DW: It seemed to me that your film had more moving moments than many of the so-called dramas which are being shown here.

FM: I like to think that people are responding to this film because they recognize it as an antidote to all of the stereotypes that we've been fed for years by the media about inner-city family life. And that they're realizing that all of those sensational news stories on at six and ten o'clock about the latest muggings and murders and drug deals and whatever are not the whole picture. And that they hopefully realize that this is something a little bit closer to what's really happening.

DW: I think it's an antidote to something else as well. There's a prevalent view in the US and internationally that phenomena like crime, drugs, etc., are caused by moral breakdown, that they are the result of individual irresponsibility. When Arthur's father says that he's lost two jobs, that's a very important moment.

FM: Absolutely. We were interested in trying to get at the social fabric that underlies this whole system of basketball as it plays itself out from the playgrounds through high schools and beyond into the whole business of sport.

DW: I presume you got close to these families. What were your relations like?

FM: They were very good. We're sort of like extended family. We feel very gratified that we were given this opportunity to get to become very friendly and intimately close with an inner-city, African-American family, a working class family. We were not documentarians who are strictly hung up on traditional objectivity. Yes, we try to present the stories as truly as we saw them emerging in front of our eyes. And they were emerging to the greatest extent without our involvement or presence impacting that story. But at the same time, we're very, for a lack of a better word, humanistic, and we care about these people and once we discovered, for example, that the Agees' power was off and that they didn't have the heat on, we did what we thought was the right thing to do and helped get it back on. We're not just going to stand back and let these people sit in the dark.

DW: I'd like your response to the argument that whites can't make films about blacks, Jews can't make films about non-Jews, men can't make films about women, etc., that entire line of thinking.

FM: I think that clearly when you're talking about making films or doing any kind of media coverage of an historically-oppressed group of people, you have to approach the subjects with great sensitivity. Because you have to be as respectful and understanding of that history as you can be. And you also have to be respectful and understanding of how much of an outsider you are. But the key thing to me is that if you start with those beginning points, then hopefully if you're sincere enough you leave that behind and you establish relations that are human relations that exist across all cultures and across all races and sexes, and that we are human beings who have a number of universal concerns. I like to think that a truly empathetic individual can establish those elemental sorts of human ties with any other kind of human individual. So I hope that our film reflects that.