Mubi Monday: Hoop Dreams (1994)

Some things are just much more inherently American than other things. Massive portions of food in their restaurants (pretty sure, from memory, that a standard burger over there is about the size of my head), the belief that guns will solve a lot of problems, despite guns arguably being THE biggest problem that they have had in the past decade (this is a sweeping generalisation to poke fun at the more extreme end of the spectrum, not every responsible gun-owner in America), and major sporting events. The UK may love football (soccer to our American friends), and somehow there are still people who enjoy the snorefest that is cricket (a sport designed to keep men busy on a Sunday afternoon in the days when all shops were closed and they only had access to one rock solid potato and the towels and spare furniture parts left in the spare room that nobody had set foot in since the great IKEA cot-building disaster of 1909), but it doesn't compare to the devotion to some big sporting events that Americans have. The Superbowl. A trip out to a baseball game. The wrestling stars who play to packed arenas. And the NBA.

Hoop Dreams is a documentary focusing on the lives of William Gates and Arthur Agee, two young African-Americans who may well find their futures greatly improved by their skill at basketball. They are given some more opportunity, and attention, at their school, comparatively speaking, and there's a lot of tension there, simply rooting for young men to handle some extreme pressure and make the most of an opportunity that may very well be a life-changing one for them.

Directed by Steve James, who also helped to write around the narrative with producer Frederick Marx, Hoop Dreams is one of many sports movies that should also appeal to people who don't really like sports. It's easy to remember the big money side of sports, and many of us will have heard about the enticements offered to students by universities with seemingly unlimited budgets to build up successful sport teams, but the best thing about this documentary is that it very much shows the real impact on the lives of young men faced with life choices put in front of them because of their sporting prowess. These are children who have found something they enjoy, something they end up being really good at, and the hard work that stems from that can be as depressing and damaging as it can be rewarding.

Gates and Agee are two different personality types, making it easier to highlight the differences and the commonalities in their stories. There's plenty of moments showing basketball being played, of course, but much more time showing how these boys/young men are affected by everything else in their lives, from the financial commitment required to keep them in a decent education to their friends and family, some of them being more supportive than others. Can they keep their heads in the game, or will they be swayed by the kind of problems that seem much larger when there's so much at stake?

I've already said a lot more than I thought I was going to say about this, which is a pleasant surprise. Although it is, essentially, a film about basketball, Hoop Dreams is about much more than that. It's about education, about class and social issues, and about the whole damn system, which is both highly problematic and yet also an essential way for many young men (no idea what, if any, opportunities are there for young women) to massively improve their lot in life.

Oh, the runtime is just under three hours. It doesn't feel that long, and it's very much worth the time investment.

9/10

https://ko-fi.com/kevinmatthews