He Got Game

I can’t recall Spike Lee’s film getting an Australian theatrical release which is understandable as not only is it, unsurprisingly, intensely concerned with the Black American experience but, more pertinently, Lee indulges his love of the game of basket ball to an extent which will probably lose non-devotees of the popular American sport.

Denzel Washington plays Jake Shuttlesworth, a middle-aged man who has been in prison for six years for accidentally killing his wife (Lonette Mckee). Jake’s son, Jesus (NBA star Ray Allen), is just finishing high school and is the Number 1 attraction for college basketball teams around the country who are vying for his enrolment. The New York State governor proposes via the prison warden (Ned Beatty) that if Jake persuades Jesus to go with the governor’s alma mater, Big State, he will get a reduced sentence.  Jake agrees but the problem is that father and son are deeply estranged.

Also written by Lee, although He Got Game is in one sense quite limited in its subject matter, the film is also a sprawling affair that swings from depicting tawdriness, whether it be Coney Island street prostitution or high-end celebrity sports decadence and the desperate lobbying of young would-be sports stars to 1994's Crooklyn–like family sentimentality.  Throw into the mix a score taken from Aaron Copland’s music with "sonics" by Public Enemy and you’ve got a lot vying for your attention.

Washington strides through all this with typical self-assurance although frankly the scenario of the turnkeys setting him up in Coney Island flop-house where he immediately takes up with a white hooker (Milla Jovovich) seems an unlikely one.  It is however intriguing to see the actor (greatly assisted by an unbecoming ‘fro) play a less dominating character than usual. Allen matches him all the way as the resolutely hostile and impressively canny son. 

He Got Game is like a compendium of Lee’s directorial style – in terms of content, his commitment to the black experience and his satirical commentary on black-white relations, formally in his use of sweeping crane shots, overhead perspectives, candy-coloured compositions and distorting lenses not to mention the presence of Washington with whom Lee had already successfully collaborated on Malcolm X  (1992) and Mo’ Better Blues (1990).  He Got Game is not as effective as either of those films, however. The film has style in spades but is diluted in substance by the hybridization of dramatic content with the director's self-indugence, at least from an Antipodean perspective, in his much-loved sport.

 

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