I finally caught up with Gina Prince-Bythewood’s Love and Basketball (2000), a film I had wanted to see for some time. It’s pretty good, a mixture of sports movie and melodrama, and one of the scandalously few films directed by a black woman to get any sort of Hollywood release…
Love and Basketball mixes the genres of sports picture and melodrama, to good effect. Monica (Sanaa Lathan) and Quincy (Omar Epps) grow up next door to one another. They are both dedicated basketball players, through high school, college, and into the pros. The film charts the highs and lows of their on-and-off love, as well as Monica’s difficulties with her mother (Alfre Woodard) and Quincy’s with his father (Dennis Haysbert).
Love and Basketball was produced by Spike Lee; it isn’t as emotionally intense as Lee’s basketball picture He Got Game, but it’s warmer, and has much better gender politics. It’s passionate about the game, but without implying that sports is somehow the only thing that matters; part of the power of the movie comes from the lovely way it intertwines the thrill of victory and the misery of defeat with the thrills and miseries of family life, and of romantic passion. This is not over-the-top melodrama of the Sirk variety, but one of a more mundane and everyday sort–though it’s whole point is to resist the genre’s traditional relegation of women to the domestic sphere.
Another way to put this: the film comes to a satisfying resolution, without being too sappy. I fear that there’s a touch of Jane Eyre in the way the plot works itself out: in effect, the woman gets the man by domesticating him. But Monica is much more powerful and assertive than poor Jane ever managed to be, and the terms of her romantic victory (“reader, I married him”) are markedly not confined to domestication. The film ends as a celebration of the WNBA, and the opportunities it gives women athletes.
Love and Basketball is a film in which all the major characters are black. It doesn’t specifically call attention to its blackness, but simply takes the texture of black middle class life in America today entirely for granted. This shouldn’t have to be noted as a special accomplishment; but it is, in a climate where stereotypes of “blackness” and of the ghetto–gangstas and hoes–are so pervasively and relentlessly marketed, both to whites and to blacks themselves.