Hoop Dreams

Saw Hoop Dreams, a documentary that follows two promising high school basketball players, William and Arthur, as they try to make it out of the Chicago slums into the NBA. As you can imagine, the journey is hard and haunted by drugs, missed bills, mothers who were both working and students themselves. The kids are told that if they want to succeed, they must only focus on basketball, but then grades and money conspire to stop them. In a sense, yes, if they were clearly the next great star, then these things would not matter, but since these boys are merely very good, their dreams stand a very good chance of being crushed. And that's the main point of this film: that these boys are surrounded by predatory talent scouts and schools who will happily crush thousands of dreams if it means getting the ball through the hoop more times than the other schools.

The film is long and thorough. There is a pugnacious angry little coach who seems to be the face of the Basketball Machine but he is given ample time too to explain his position; that this sport is his life. He is giving the best advice he knows how to give and wants only success (as defined by success in basketball) for these kids. Far worse are the oily school recruiters who glibly toss around assurances of money and mix reassurances with veiled threats.

The greatest parts of the film are moments of success for the kids and for their families. There's a moment when a mother, whose electricity was shut off a month ago, gets a dream job as an RA nurse. She's so happy she cries and most of the audience, I imagine, is crying as well. This is not a dour film. There's many small moments to be grateful for. It's still a film about people struggling against a system more powerful than them, but the film goes out of its way to establish this system as being made up of mere people who all mean well.