Great article by Vanity Fair on He Got Game's 20th Anniversary, and how the film has stood the test of time and should be essential viewing. Vanity Fair isn't a sports publication, so the fact that they are also covering the film's anniversary says a lot.
www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2018/05/he-got-game-20th-anniversaryJESUS SAVES
20 Years After Its Release, Spike Lee’s Basketball Epic He Got Game Remains Searing and Essential
The barn-burning Denzel Washington vehicle was too much for 1998—and it's still as righteous as ever.
by K. AUSTIN COLLINS
MAY 2, 2018 1:55 PM
Courtesy of Buena Vista Pictures/Courtesy Everett Collection
Whether or not you remember how it ends, if you’ve seen it, you’ve likely been unable to shake how He Got Game begins. Spike Lee’s film opens on soaring, enormous images of unrepentantly American cities and plains, with men and women of every color—but mostly men, and mostly black and white—pictured in backyards and fields, on boardwalks, beside abandoned gas stations, and in fenced-off basketball courts neighboring the projects. They’re shooting hoops: posing, dribbling, showing off, bodies jostling against each other, breathing the sport of basketball to life in wondrous slow motion.
It’s a credit sequence that doubles as a mission statement. First: this sport is beautiful. And the bodies playing it are united in this beauty, even as time, space, gender, and color differentiate them. Next: this is a story broad enough to encompass street ball, the pro leagues, and everything and everyone in between, from the shadows of the Twin Towers to the prairies, to Chicago’s since-demolished Cabrini-Green projects. The opening sequence is practically an anthem in images. There’s more at stake here, it tells us, than merely the travails of man and sport.
Just listen to the music. By 1998, Lee had established himself as a director with, among other things, an incisive musical palette: films like Jungle Fever and Do the Right Thing are as memorable for their evocative needle drops—Stevie Wonder and Public Enemy, respectively—as they are for their politics or Lee’s whirligig visual style. But even by those standards, He Got Game’s opening moments are daringly incongruous. The opening credits are scored not to music of the moment, but to the clamoring, industrial lyricism of “John Henry,” Aaron Copland’s 1940 symphonic portrait of the 19th-century black folk hero and steel driver who, the story goes, took American labor capital to task in a one-man race against a steam-powered hammer.
It’s a pointed choice, echoed throughout in further Copland selections, largely from his masterpiece Appalachian Spring. It doesn’t fit—but doesn’t it? He Got Game will tell the story of a young basketball star named Jesus Shuttlesworth (played by professional baller Ray Allen, then of the Milwaukee Bucks), who goes to the fictional Abraham Lincoln High School and plays for the “Rail Splitters”—an odd name for a basketball team, unless, I suppose, you’re a character in a Spike Lee movie. John Henry, it should be remembered, is for African-Americans a symbol of might and moral certitude in the face of exploitation, among other things. Jesus Shuttlesworth, meanwhile, is the No. 1 high-school prospect in the country, and as dramatized by Lee’s righteous, sensationalistic film, the choices before him—college, or pro? And if college, which school?—ensure that he, too, become a symbol of exploitation.
The movie piles it on. A trusted coach tries to buy Jesus’s confidence by paying his rent and offering him $10,000 “loans.” An N.B.A. agent tries to buy him off with Ferraris and a watch worth at least a year of college tuition. College hosts try to ply him with alcohol and a parade of indistinguishable coeds. His own girlfriend, Lala (Rosario Dawson), and the uncle who’s taken care of him and his sister since his father was sent to prison for the murder of his mother, are in on it, too. So, in his own way, is Jesus’s father, Jake (Denzel Washington), who’s been released on the condition that he nudge his son to choose the right school.
In the 20 years since its release, He Got Game’s reputation has ebbed with the culture. It failed to become a box-office hit and was released to mixed enthusiasm; even some of its positive notices were condescending, a posture that’s plagued Lee’s work since the beginning. The movie was too long, too loose, and, per the director’s films broadly, too on the nose with anger. David Edelstein, writing for Slate, praised it for sustaining an energy and mythopoetic grandeur that made it fun to watch, but noted it was an uphill battle in the context of Lee’s work. “The hope is always there,” wrote Edelstein—speaking for many, one gathers—“that Lee will transcend his anger and egotism and paranoia and make a film that feels organic.” By those standards, it’s a wonder He Got Game passed muster.
But that, I think, is why I love it—why I keep returning to it. The anger, egotism, and paranoia lend themselves to a movie as rich and various as the country it’s about. The movie combines prison melodrama, domestic soap opera, ESPN-esque hype reels, and the monied aspirationalism of 90s hip-hop videos to bear on a plot that twines the moral redemption of a black American felon—and the reconciliation of a father and son—with a loaded racial critique of the commerce of basketball. It’s a sprawling but enduring snapshot of its era.
Frankly, calling the film’s critique “loaded” is to understate the case; the plot is aggressively over-the-top, with purpose. The governor of New York is a former college baller, an alum of the generically named Big State, who wants Jesus to attend his alma mater—so much so that he’s willing to serve Jake a “get out of jail free” card under the most unlikely conditions. This is ridiculous—and revealingly ostentatious. This, Lee tells us, is basketball’s commercial importance: it’s powerful enough to merit letting a black convicted murderer be set free for a week for the sake of a game. And this being a Lee film, the irony of Jake being black in these conditions is double-underlined and in bold print.
The movie is an unsettling mixture of pulp and polemic, with old tropes—a jailbird promised freedom if he works on behalf of the state, a daddy issue–laden hero with a God complex, Samson and Delilah, a hooker with a heart of gold—recombined to assert an aggressive political point. It isn’t lost on the movie that Jake is caught in a staggering double-bind. As the only person in Jesus’s life who’s got more on his mind than moneybags, he is in substantial ways the purest moral force in the movie. But he’s also a man whose early basketball coaching was rooted in humiliation, and whose rage and alcoholism led to the violent death of his wife.
The entire movie is predicated on contradictions like these—down to the mere fact of Lee, of all people, proffering such a cynical vision of basketball as a business. Lee had, by the time of this film, gotten a reputation for being a truth-telling sellout. A few years before, he was seen in the film Hoop Dreams lecturing a group of teenage Nike-basketball campers on exploitation: “You have to realize,” he said, “that nobody cares about you. You’re black; you’re a young male. All you’re supposed to do is deal drugs and mug women. The only reason why you’re here: you could make their team win. If the team wins, these schools get a lot of money. This whole thing is revolving around money.” At the time, on American TV sets, Lee was probably best known to the public at large for playing Mars Blackmon: the flipped-brim sneakers enthusiast he debuted in his 1986 feature She’s Gotta Have It, who, through some imaginative casting on the part of Nike’s ad agency, Wieden+Kennedy, became the face of the Air Jordans campaign. He was the guy half Michael Jordan’s height, flitting around to provide a single punch line: “Yo Mike—what makes you the best player in the universe? . . . It’s gotta be the shoes!”
Courtesy of Walt Disney Co./Courtesy Everett Collection.
He was (and still is) the face of fanatical-celebrity basketball fandom, too. Before Drake or Jay-Z, there was a Spike courtside at Madison Square Garden; he's made a show of trash-talking the likes of Kevin Love, LeBron James, Paul Pierce, Kevin Garnett, and Kobe Bryant. In one famous episode from the 1994 NBA playoffs, Reggie Miller was caught having an “animated discussion” with Lee as he scored 25 points in the 4th quarter on behalf of the Pacers, crushing Lee’s beloved Knicks. Lee was such a reliable figure at these games that even the opposing team’s players considered him a stand-in for New York and its rabid fans.
In that context, He Got Game would seem to be a strange film. Or maybe not. Capital itself is ultimately not what Lee is afraid of: it’s the way black men, in particular, get lured into it with the promise of being its purveyors, when in fact they are the product. There’s often a cost to progress in Lee’s work. In films like Jungle Fever and the more recent, feverishly strange She Hate Me, there is no black middle class wholly divorced from the black underclass—no neat pivot from one to the next, no sense that class privilege, for blacks, functions as outright privilege. You can feel that tension in He Got Game, too, and in the severity with which the movie undercuts Jesus’s dreams of an uncomplicated, well-off future. Always, there’ll be a price to pay.
The movie endures, in part, because of what it’s about, but it also remains searing, and eminently watchable, for the performances—Washington’s in particular. This, for my money, is one of his richest, most surprising turns, in part because it’s among his most terrifying. Lee wields Washington’s charm and largesse against him. The righteous anger we saw in Glory and Malcolm X gets stripped of its righteousness here, as Washington becomes a man of unforgivable fury. Flashbacks of him training and humiliating his son are heartbreaking and, for Washington’s movie-star image, tensely self-excoriating. Ray Allen, to his genuine credit, holds his own against the fire and brimstone, keeping the movie grounded in recognizable reality with an understated air and sense of humor.
The movie is inevitably imperfect. Its depictions of women seem especially limiting: the mother and the whore, on the one hand, and in the character of Lala, the Delilah to Jesus’s Samson, on the other. You wish this aspect of it were as forward-looking and complex, or at least as willing to question its own pretenses, as the rest of the story. (A subplot with Milla Jovovich, who plays the sex worker Dakota, whom Jake develops a liking for, remains unsatisfying.)
Still, the movie soars, veering off the rails under the weight of its plots, subplots, themes, subthemes, montages, tangents, and non-sequiturs. In sum: it’s a Spike Lee Joint, and still one of his most invigorating. The movie is too big, too complex, too sentimental—too much. The movie is dangerous. And the last 20 years have only proven it right.
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