Hoop Dreams

365 Films

Entry #41

Hoop Dreams (1994)

Directed by Steve James

As hard as it might be to believe now, I used to be a sports obsessed nut.  Well, that’s not the whole truth; I was a basketball nut and more specifically, a Michael Jordan nut.  Call it being a front-runner, call it picking the player and team who always won, call it whatever you want, Jordan was my guy and basketball was my sport.  I offer all of this by way of explanation as to how a ten year old came to see a three-hour documentary about two high school basketball prodigies from inner city Chicago.  Utterance of merely the word, basketball and I was sprinting to the nearest possible theater.  Hoop Dreams was something of a phenomenon of its time.  It was an art house movie that managed to sneak its way into the multiplex, garnering an incredible amount of critical raves while doing so.  Championed by Siskel and Ebert from the very beginning with the two even going so far as to investigate the nominating process for the Best Documentary Oscar when the film failed to garner an award.  Eventually, Hoop Dreams even came to change that process by requiring that actual documentary filmmakers be allowed to vote for the documentary award, which was not the case before this film.  The film even took the top spot as Roger Ebert’s best film of the 90’s.  This is all a way of saying not bad for a documentary about two poor Black families struggling to stay afloat in a film that began as a half hour PBS special.  I feel like I’ve said this next sentence so many times in this series that it’s about to lose all meaning for me but…none of this made any sense to me when I first saw it.  I wasn’t aware of the immersive cinema verite techniques deployed by director Steve James.  I wasn’t aware of the tragic portrait of a crumbling American city and the unfortunate citizens trapped in its collapse.  I wasn’t aware of the rigged game being perpetrated on so many promising athletes and their families as scouts and college representatives make lofty promises they have no intention of keeping.  And even these simplistic summations are nothing compared to the vast, complex, and inter-weaving narrative that James unfolds with absolute grace in this film.  Hoop Dreams is Dickens as a documentary (and I know that is an incredibly over-used term but what are you gonna do?)  The reason I am including it on this list is because it introduced the documentary as a brand new genre to me.  A genre that with this film that promised the integrity of investigative journalism with the poetry and subtlety of a great novel.  Documentaries have become a rather abused medium in the past two decades.  Years and years of forgettable sloganeering and lazy filmmaking have produced a healthy skepticism to the form.  But we must never forget that there are still sterling executions of the genre that will continue to retain the power of all great works of art.  For me, that power begins and ends with Hoop Dreams.  One final thing, Steve James has directed and co-directed many other great films in the time since Hoop Dreams.  If you haven’t seen The Interrupters, At The Death House Door, or his 30 for 30 Entry: No Crossover: The Trial of Allen Iverson please do so now.  RIGHT THE HELL NOW.