It's the fifth Letterboxd Season Challenge! Theme seven, part one - one of Spike Lee's essential films for aspiring directors!
(Chosen by me.)
Some personal context: I ran cross country and track in high school. Had done so since middle school on recommendation from my parents I find some extracurricular activity, and kept at it until graduation through sheer inertia. I'd run all through the last few years and somehow not quit, why stop now? In retrospect, sticking it out was a poor idea, because bad experiences with the team, my coach, my self-esteem, and pretty much anything and everything related to running now comprise the majority of my memories about high school, and play a big part in my reticence to think about that period of my life as anything other than an amorphous mass I wish hadn't happened. Snapping in the middle of a race and trying to punch a teammate for cheering me from the sidelines, trying in vain year after year to stop the team from hazing new members, almost getting pushed off a cliff during a practice run as a joke, undergoing multiple breakdowns at running camp that probably predicted my more extreme breaks in university, the generally poor recurring impression of someone yelling at or lecturing you for not trying harder when you'd genuinely given your all. Doubtless there are good experiences in there too, of managing a personal best sub-11 minute two mile race or briefly feeling like part of a cohesive social unit, but it's all overwhelmed by the lingering echo of being flat-out told my life would go nowhere because I didn't get an athletic scholarship for college or getting practically run over by a crowd eager to cross the course without considering the person running last place. I do not like being reminded of my high school athletic career, and would much prefer it fade from memory entirely.
So, for my part, Hoop Dreams plays as a three-hour protracted reminder of such, and I need to power through these personal issues to discuss its contents. Regardless of differing circumstances, many of these images and incidents resonate nonetheless. William Gates' summer sporting camp was a prestigious recruiting program for potential college talent where mine was something run by friendly coaches to keep the team bond high over break, but the sense memory of being angrily lectured over how you have to meet your potential or else you'll amount to nothing stings all the same. Arthur Agee shows far more potential as a varsity player on his basketball team than I ever did as a member of the JV squad for cross country, yet I still remember the pressure to perform academically and physically. I never had a talent scout single me out as special while their entire story is predicated on such potential uplift, I took well to study where they struggled, I came from a financially and emotionally stable household where they both felt the impact of poverty around the corner and frequently absent fathers, I'm white and could treat sports as just a thing to do, they're black and got caught in a system where sports were presented as the only avenue to personal advancement. And despite all of this, despite my lack of serious injury and promise of greatness and any direct parallel beyond "I played a sport in high school," the recurring sight of their coaches getting aggressive in a heated moment was enough to make the majority of Hoop Dreams a very much unwanted trip down Traumatic Memory Lane.
Let us therefore set all this aside, and discuss Hoop Dreams on its own terms, for it is still a remarkable feat of documentary filmmaking that deserves consideration beyond the context of my baggage. This is, above all else, a remarkably empathetic picture, one originally conceived as a thirty-minute television program for PBS before producer/director saw the potential in his subjects' story well beyond his original commission for a piece about playground basketball. Such an expansion in scope could easily become like any other documentary following a promising or interesting subject through an atypical period of their life, either fully focused on the subject to exclusion of all else, or filtering other people in their circles as relevant only in how they relate back to the main story. With Hoop Dreams, James and his crew took advantage of their increased prerogative to film and edit a view into high school athletics and black urban life with an eye for giving everyone in the story a say. One can be cynical and claim Spike Lee lists this as an essential film for personal reasons (he pulls a brief appearance as a speaker at Gates' summer camp, and audio from Do the Right Thing appears on a radio program), but I believe any aspiring directors should take the film's commitment to a complete picture to heart.
Our core focus is very much on William and Arthur as they are accepted to the prestigious Saint Joseph High School on the strength of their basketball talent, only for William's skill on the court to earn him a sponsor who helps him stick it out to the end despite debilitating knee injuries andnear-misses at greatness, while Arthur's supposed lesser potential costs him a scholarship and forces him back into public education with the private school holding his transcripts and future hostage. Despite more than half of the story's timeline playing out in the first thirty minutes before James received a grant for true larger scope filming, the film makes the most of its glimpse into these four years by expanding its focus beyond whether or not William and Arthur will perform well in their respective leagues and graduate on time. It is as much their story as those of Emma Gates and Sheila Agee trying to keep their families afloat amidst long periods of unemployment and uncertain marriages, as of Bo Agee's struggles to stay on the right side of the law for the sake of his wife and children, as of William Crawford attempting to live vicariously through his son's achievements, as of William's girlfriend Catherine and their newborn child. Its concerns lie not only in the realm of success on the court, but on the exhaustion and frustrations inherent to an underfunded education system, the dual-faced nature of private schools' supposed altruistic uplifting, the unfair pressure to perform, the difficulty of accepting something less when you were promised the world, trying to be more than just your valued physicality. It will ask and explore questions of just how fair its entire premise is when considered against the value of more substantial social reform just as readily as it will buy into the dream of making the NBA as something worth watching every shot of the semi-finals over.
And importantly, vitally, it does not make villains of its participants, nor martyrs of its subjects. Regardless of how often Bo slips back into near-compulsive crime, were asked to understand him as a man trying to do right by his family, not a failure or criminal. William Crawford's relationship to his son is more tragic than disgusting, as we see him a man who missed his shot and never found his center again. Coach Pangborn of Saint Joseph's is a far, FAR more aggressive, abrasive coach than Coach Bedford of Marshall High, and Bedford's accusations of Pangborn screwing over Arthur because he couldn't profit off the boy as much as he'd have liked land hard and true, yet we also see enough of Pangborn's function as head coach and lead staffer at the private school to understand he goes through such a story with every potential talent he encounters. There are actions aplenty to flay these people alive over, and justifiably so, if only doing so wouldn't cost Hoop Dreams its vision of William and Arthur as kids doing their best under less than ideal circumstances. Even without knowing as we do now that neither achieved their golden dream of matching Isiah Thomas and playing for the majors, the film places careful emphasis on how important it is they live their lives according to what's best for them now and in the future, and not forever wallow in the bog of what might've been. To demonize those who let them down or complicated their lives would be to consequently place shine on them beyond just being teenagers doing their level best - make Pangborn or Bo look worse through open condemnation, and you place William or Arthur on pedestals above what they are.
Certainly, through its willingness to present just how needlessly harsh and punitive student athletic programs can be towards those they tempted with promises of glory, Hoop Dreams isn't at all wishy-washy for its refusal to condemn. I mean not to claim it thinks the systemic or personal wrongs it observes and presents as guiltless or morally neutral. Rather, I mean it refuses these moral judgments out of fidelity to the goal of completeness. Everything here is meant to come across on the same level of persons grappling with their own issues, never invalidating those who cross its camera or implying their personal benefit or punishment would meaningfully change things for those caught in the same situation. There's temptation aplenty over the course of three hours to find someone who can play the bad guy, and yet we reach William and Arthur's graduations with a lasting sense of these lives as nuanced REAL lives. All will continue on best they can, regardless of where the road takes them (or took them, in the case of those gone too soon in the following years), and make what comes their way into worthwhile lives all the same. Dreams of stardom can motivate one to reach beyond, it it's important to take what you actually grasp no matter what it is, and I believe Hoop Dreams imparts this with a successful totality of purpose better than most documentaries.
It's a withering, difficult film for me thanks to my excess high school baggage, yet I believe it hits so hard precisely because its rounded, detailed portraits of all participants shortens distance and makes the commonalities stand out all the more.
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