In Gina Prince Bythewood’s Love & Basketball (2000), our romantic leads can’t function right in their relationship if their connection to their shared sport of choice isn’t properly humming and vice versa. Monica and Quincy (Sanaa Lathan and Omar Epps) grew up next door to each other in Atlanta; basketball brought them together. Incognito as a boy with her hair tucked into a purple Lakers hat, a young Monica (Kyla Pratt) first introduced herself by slouching toward the court little Quincy (Glenndon Chatman) and his friends were playing on one balmy afternoon. Immediately she bested everyone — though not without getting a scar on her lower right cheek after Quincy pushed her during a play.
Monica was and is more proud of the scar than self-conscious about it. Quincy was quickly charmed by this girl who not only thinks like that but also takes basketball — which his dad (Dennis Haysbert) plays professionally — as seriously as, maybe even more seriously than, he does. Quincy and Monica are fast friends. Briefly in their tweendom they tried to become boyfriend and girlfriend. But that ended about as quickly as it started, Monica so pissed off when Quincy alluded to her being his property that the two were brawling on the lawn like wrestlers just moments after they shared their first kiss.
Maybe it’s a good thing their romance stalled, because in the ensuing years they only get better and better at their sport — best-on-their-team good. They also become better and better friends, to the point that Quincy will sometimes creep in through Monica’s bedroom window on nights when his parents, whose marriage is running on fumes, are fighting particularly badly and he needs a quiet place to sleep. Monica doesn’t ask any questions.
Of course it’s no surprise when romance comes. This foundation of friendship is so strong; so is this equally obsessive relationship with basketball. The latter, though, is precisely what can make things tricky. The movie follows Monica and Quincy as they weave in and out of romance across decades. Prince-Bythewood, who also wrote Love & Basketball’s script, is exacting about how the obstacles and general frustrations around the sport can drastically differ between professional men and women basketball players, how much differently a dream scenario between genders playing the sport can unfold. (Monica is frequently penalized for “aggression” toward coaches during games when Quincy’s never had to think twice about it; later in their careers, Monica has to travel to Europe to play when pickings prove slim in America, whereas Quincy needn’t worry about finding a gig stateside.) The movie is insightful about how romances between people with great passions in life can be at once strengthened and doomed by them, too. Monica and Quincy are easy to root for in part because Lathan and Epps’ chemistry has such an effortlessness. But you always worry about their dedication to their sport and the possibility that it could overshadow everything else.
Love & Basketball sensitively explores how Monica’s and Quincy’s relationship with their sport play into their relationships with their families. It homes in specifically on Quincy’s relationship with his father, Zeke, and Monica’s relationship with her mother, Camille (Alfre Woodard). Our parents often use us as personified second chances for unmet dreams. We, in turn, might see aspects of the lives they’re currently leading and hope we don’t one day embody them ourselves. Zeke never found true greatness in his career. He did, though, get to know the temptations of adoring female fans. The misguided confidence it instilled in him, not to mention his eventual giving in to those temptations, has jeopardized his relationships with his wife (a very good Debbi Morgan) and their son. Camille has so internalized traditional gender roles that she constantly bemoans Monica’s love for basketball growing up as little more than a tomboy phase. When Monica gets older and shows that her dedication is real, Camille continues to condescend to her gusto as frivolous, unwilling to consider even momentarily that an athletic career has worth. The romantic throughline in Love & Basketball is the best, most rewarding thing about it. But its attentiveness toward prickly parental relationships is just as well-realized, encapsulating with clarity how we at once crave the respect and praise of the people who raised us even when what they say and do would earn our dismissal if to come from a stranger.
Epps and Lathan are both excellent. But you leave Love & Basketball thinking more often about Lathan, who plays with such vigor a young woman forced without end to prove her commitment to her sport to people who just can’t believe a woman could love basketball this much. That things work out not just for love but the game in Love & Basketball doesn’t feel like easy sentimentality but a well-deserved win.
IT ISN’T OFTEN A FILMMAKER makes two movies in one year with the same lead and the same themes. Prince-Bythewood, a unicorn, did just that with Love & Basketball and Disappearing Acts. Love & Basketball is the superior movie by a lot — probably because it was Lisa Jones, not Prince-Bythewood, who was responsible for Disappearing Acts’ screenplay. But the latter, made for HBO, is still very good. It’s a heartfelt melodrama that, similarly to Love & Basketball, is interested in how difficult it can be for love to survive when extenuating circumstances strain on it too hard.
The couple we’re meant to root for in Disappearing Acts are Zora and Franklin (Lathan and Wesley Snipes), New Yorkers who, when they first meet each other, are in transition. Zora has just moved into a brownstone in Manhattan and teaches music at a nearby elementary school. What she really wants, though, is a professional singing career. Her attainable white whale at the moment is saving up enough money to get a demo made with an on-the-come-up producer (Q-Tip) one of her good friends (Regina Hall) has a connection to. Franklin gets by as a construction worker under a fickle boss (Michael Imperioli) but is trying to start a private-contracting business. Zora likes the idea of growing with someone in a relationship, and so quickly the two are off to the races, even surviving the big reveals that Franklin has two sons and, though separated from their mother, hasn’t yet started the divorce process.
Some of the obstacles to come, and how they’re presented, have a soapiness. There’s a badly timed pregnancy, a flare-up of alcoholism, even a B-plot involving hidden epilepsy. But even if it sometimes can stretch credulity with just how much it’s willing to throw at this couple — who, from the jump, never seem quite as perfect together as Monica and Quincy — it’s easy to appreciate a romantic movie following an ordinary couple trying to survive mostly ordinary ordeals. It’s always clear that of less interest is the promise of them being together — a happy ending — and more just exploring how delicate a thing love is. That’s not altogether rare in movies. But that Disappearing Acts’ narrative doesn’t as much evoke other romantic films as it does the stories of doomed couples you know is what I like most about it.
Peterson Reviews 