Hoop Dreams is telling the truth — even when it’s trying not to

By Sriman Narayanan

“How can you not be romantic about baseball?” Brad Pitt asks Jonah Hill, the audience, the Academy, in Moneyball. The movie doesn’t try to answer that question, of course, because no fiction film about sports actually can, actually has. None I’ve seen, at least.

No, because how do you make a fundamentally unromantic movie about sports without acknowledging everything wrong with sports? I fear there wouldn’t be any time for an underwritten girlfriend. No time for a training montage that’s way too intense and impractical to actually build strength, improve conditioning; no time for chicken chasing, for wind sprints until 19-year-olds are coughing up blood. Definitely none for a turning point in the championship match, for our hero to decide to work just a little bit harder and get up off the mat, shake off his brain injury, and defeat evil. Or the Soviets.

You can’t look to Moneyball to answer that question, if you’d like one. Because Aaron Sorkin is a curator, and perhaps the best indictment of sports requires no curation at all.

How can you not be romantic about baseball? About sports? Consider Hoop Dreams.

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Hoop Dreams, thankfully, lacks much of what deters me from films about sports, thanks to the fact that there’s only so much you can curate about a film this dark.

The problem posed by curation is simultaneously more and less present in documentary filmmaking than its fictive sibling. In Hoop Dreams’ case, narrowing 250 hours of footage over five years to a slim three is inherently curative. Every scene becomes a decision by its very inclusion. One wonders how many different films are stuck inside those 250 hours, and wonders what those other films may think about Coach Pingatore, about Arthur Agee Sr., about whether these boys are ultimately failures or successes. Hoop Dreams is a decision.

But documentary of this breadth also forces truths, however unwanted, to poke through the surface of its film, in spite of even the most controlling curators’ desire to smooth it down. Regardless of however many films Hoop Dreams could have been, none of those cuts could have avoided the deepest truth about the piece: the eyes of its leads, Arthur and William.

A reverent gaze from freshman Arthur, directed at Pistons legend Isiah Thomas; elevated, elated eyebrows from William for his new daughter; Arthur’s adolescent desire to not further express his happiness on his 18th birthday, pulling down on the lid of a white cap; William’s ability to nail a free throw with his lids shut; Arthur’s tight stare into nothing at all, keeping anger close so as not to let it all explode it over his vacillating father or the recruiter luring him into signing his next two years away; William’s similarly stifled resentment for Coach Pingatore, as the white man attempts to close the loop of the last four years with a manufactured sense of boomer sweetness.

These truths arrive everywhere, when you look for them: boys increasingly disillusioned with the goals once set for them. They even arrive in contrast to the decisions of the filmmakers.

Hoop Dreams shows Arthur and his family, the undersized, underrecruited guard with a household in tumult, finding the only true moments of catharsis of the film, when his John Marshall High School upsets a powerhouse in the semifinal and wins the city championship over a rival. The film narrates over the games’ highlights, “The Commandos get aggressive on defense, and use their superior speed on offense… Marshall proves to everybody they have what it takes to be city champs.” Arthur covers his eyes so as not to show his tears, and tells his father he loves him.

William watches on from the stands. His team got bounced early in the playoffs by Nazareth Academy, in part thanks to Coach Pingatore benching William for arriving late to the game.

The film is asking us to believe that Arthur’s team deserved to win because they, he, made the right choices, that William’s team did not because he did not. A film that depicts choice as being absent these boys’ lives can’t help but bend right back to it. Did Arthur choose for his father to leave? To develop an addiction to crack cocaine? Did William choose to hurt his knee? To miss the layup that would’ve tied his final high school game? If choice means intention, here, then the answer is clearly no.

This is the false axiom of sports — that winners are determined by choices, so inversely, those choices are the causes of wins. And since wins are all that matter, all narrative around sports must inherently revolve around the acquisition of them. Narrative cannot be focused on indicting the pursuit at all. The film seems to simultaneously indict and lean into this pursuit. But what if Arthur had been hurt, instead of William? Would Marshall, then, not have had “what it takes to be city champs?” Are the boys less worthy?

And yet, this indictment still comes through, if not thanks to the directors, then in spite of them. The story shows the pursuit is marred by the eyes of predatory white men, which leer at black bodies, looking to bend them to their wills such that their jobs remain in their own grips. And the boys who are looked at, they turn inward, they seem to ask themselves if this is what they wanted at all. The movie doesn’t raise these questions, but I believe that the boys do.

Inside of Hoop Dreams are many films, but the one I’m focused on is this quiet, harrowing one, the one whose villain is so sinister that even its directors are afraid to look at it.