Awake in the Dark: The Best of Roger Ebert (37 page)

We know all about the dream. We watch Michael Jordan and Isiah Thomas and the others on television, and we understand why any kid with talent would hope to be out on the same courts someday. But Hoop Dreams is not simply about basketball. It is about the texture and reality of daily existence in a big American city. And as the film follows Agee and Gates through high school and into their first year of college, we understand all of the human dimensions behind the easy media images of life in the "ghetto."

We learn, for example, of how their extended families pull together to help give kids a chance. How if one family member is going through a period of trouble (Arthur's father is fighting a drug problem), others seem to rise to periods of strength. How if some family members are unemployed, or if the lights get turned off, there is also somehow an uncle with a big back yard, just right for a family celebration. We see how the strong black church structure provides support and encouragement-how it is rooted in reality, accepts people as they are, and believes in redemption.

And how some people never give up. Arthur's mother asks the filmmakers, "Do you ever ask yourself how I get by on $268 a month and keep this house and feed these children? Do you ever ask yourself that question?" Yes, frankly, we do. But another question is how she finds such determination and hope that by the end of the film, miraculously, she has completed her education as a nursing assistant. Hoop Dreams contains more actual information about life as it is lived in poor black city neighborhoods than any other film I have ever seen. Because we see where William and Arthur come from, we understand how deeply they hope to transcendto use their gifts to become pro athletes. We follow their steps along the path that will lead, they hope, from grade school to the NBA.

The people at St. Joseph's High School are not pleased with the way they appear in the film, and have filed suit, saying among other things that they were told the film would be a nonprofit project to be aired on PBS, not a commercial venture. The filmmakers respond that they, too, thought it would-that the amazing response which has found it a theatrical release is a surprise to them. The movie simply turned out to be a masterpiece, and its intended noncommercial slot was not big enough to hold it. The St. Joseph suit reveals understandable sensitivity, because not all of the St. Joseph people come out looking like heroes.

It is as clear as night and day that the only reason Arthur Agee and William Gates are offered scholarships to St. Joseph's in the first place is because they are gifted basketball players. They are hired as athletes as surely as if they were free agents in pro ball; suburban high schools do not often send scouts to the inner city to find future scientists or teachers.

Both sets of parents are required to pay a small part of the tuition costs. When William's family cannot pay, a member of the booster club pays for him-because he seems destined to be a high school all-American. Arthur at first does not seem as talented. And when he has to drop out of the school because his parents have both lost their jobs, there is no sponsor for him. Instead, there's a telling scene where the school refuses to release his transcripts until the parents have paid their share of his tuition.

The morality here is clear: St. Joseph's wanted Arthur, recruited him, and would have found tuition funds for him if he had played up to expectations. When he did not, the school held the boy's future as hostage for a debt his parents clearly would never have contracted if the school's recruiters had not come scouting grade school playgrounds for the boy. No wonder St. Joseph's feels uncomfortable. Its behavior seems like something out of Dickens. The name Scrooge comes to mind.

Gene Pingatore, the coach at St. Joseph's, is a party to the suit (which actually finds a way to plug the Isiah Thomas connection). He feels he's seen in an unattractive light. I thought he came across fairly well. Like all coaches, he believes athletics are a great deal more important than they really are, and there is a moment when he leaves a decision to Gates that Gates is clearly not well-prepared to make. But it isn't Pingatore, but the whole system, that is brought into question: what does it say about the values involved, when the pro sports machine reaches right down to eighthgrade playgrounds?

But the film is not only, or mostly, about such issues. It is about the ebb and flow of life over several years, as the careers of the two boys go through changes so amazing that, if this were fiction, we would say it was unbelievable. The filmmakers (Steve James, Frederick Marx, and Peter Gilbert) shot miles of film, 25o hours in all, and that means they were there for several of the dramatic turning points in the lives of the two young men. For both, there are reversals of fortune-life seems bleak, and then is redeemed by hope and even sometimes triumph. I was caught up in their destinies as I rarely am in a fiction thriller, because real life can be a cliffhanger, too.

Many filmgoers are reluctant to see documentaries, for reasons I've never understood; the good ones are frequently more absorbing and entertaining than fiction. Hoop Dreams, however, is not only a documentary. It is also poetry and prose, muckraking and expose, journalism and polemic. It is one of the great moviegoing experiences of my lifetime.

NOVEMBER 10, 1995

Oh, this movie is so sad! It is sad not because of the tragic lives of its characters, but because of their goodness and their charity. What moves me the most in movies is not when something bad happens, but when characters act unselfishly. In Leaving Las Vegas, a man loses his family and begins to drink himself to death. He goes to Vegas, and there on the street he meets a prostitute, who takes him in and cares for him, and he calls her his angel. But he doesn't stop drinking.

The man's name is Ben (Nicolas Cage). The woman's name is Sera (Elisabeth Shue). You will not see two better performances this year. Midway in the film someone offers Ben the insight that his drinking is a way of killing himself. He smiles lopsidedly and offers a correction: "Killing myself is a way of drinking." At one point, after it is clear that Sera really cares for him, he tells her, "You can never, ever, ask me to stop drinking, do you understand?" She replies in a little voice: "I do, I really do." In a sense, it is a marriage vow.

The movie is not really about alcoholism. It is about great sad passion, of the sort celebrated in operas like La Boheme. It takes place in bars and dreary rented rooms and the kind of Vegas poverty that includes a parking space and the use of the pool. The practical details are not quite realistic-it would be hard to drink as much as Ben drinks and remain conscious, and it is unlikely an intelligent prostitute would allow him into her life. We brush those objections aside, because they have nothing to do with the real subject of this movie, which is that we must pity one another, and be gentle.

Ben was a movie executive. Something bad happened in his life, and his wife and son are gone. Is he divorced? Are they dead? It is never made clear. "I'm not sure if I lost my family because of my drinking, or if I'm drinking because I lost my family," he muses. The details would not help, because this is not a case history but a sad love song. Cage, a resourceful and daring actor, has never been better.

Consider an opening scene where Ben attempts to make jokey small talk with some former colleagues who have long since written him off as a lost cause. He desperately needs money because he needs a drink-"now, right now!" He is shaking. He may go into convulsions. Yet he manufactures desperately inane chatter, dropping famous names. Finally one of the former friends takes him aside, gives him some money, and says, "I think it would be best if you didn't contact me again." Minutes later, brought back to life by alcohol, he is trying to pick up a woman at a bar: "You smell good," he says. She catches a whiff of his breath: "You've been drinking all day."

What could possibly attract Sera, the prostitute, to this wounded man? We learn a little about her, in close-ups where she talks about her life to an invisible therapist. She is proud of the way she controls her clients and sets the scenarios. She is adamant that none of them is ever really allowed to know her. She has an abusive relationship with a pimp (Julian Sands), and we can guess that she probably also had an abusive father; it usually works out that way. The pimp is soon out of the picture, and Leaving Las Vegas becomes simply the story of two people. Perhaps she likes Ben because he is so desperate and honest. She takes him in as she might take in a wet puppy.

It is unclear to what extent he fully understands his circumstances. At times he hallucinates. He calls her his "angel" fancifully, but there are moments when she literally seems to be an angel. He hears voices behind the walls. He shakes uncontrollably. He asks her, "How did our evening go?" There is a curious, effective scene in which he tries to get a check cashed, and his hands shake too much to sign his name. He goes off to drink himself into steadiness, and then it seems he returns and makes obscene suggestions to the teller, but they all take place in his head.

Mike Figgis, who wrote, directed, and composed the music, is a filmmaker attracted to the far shores of behavior. Here he began with a novel by a man named John O'Brien, whose autobiographical sources can be guessed by the information that he killed himself two weeks after selling the book rights. To be sure this project wasn't compromised, Figgis shot it as an independent film, using Super 16 cameras to grab Las Vegas locations. The outdoor scenes feel unrehearsed and real.

The movie works as a love story, but really romance is not the point here, any more than sex is. The story is about two wounded, desperate, marginal people, and how they create for each other a measure of grace. One scene after another finds the right note. If there are two unplayable roles in the stock repertory, they are the drunk and the whore with a heart of gold. Cage and Shue make these two cliches into unforgettable people. Cage's drunkenness is inspired in part by a performance he studied, Albert Finney's alcoholic consul in Under the Volcano. You sense an observant intelligence peering out from inside the drunken man and seeing everything, clearly and sadly.

Shue's prostitute is however the crucial role, because Sera is the one with a choice. She sees Ben clearly, and decides to stick with him for the rest of the ride. When he lets her down badly, toward the end of the movie, she goes out and does something that no hooker should do-gets herself into a motel room with a crowd of drunken college boys-and we see how she needed Ben because she desperately needed to do something good for somebody. He was her redemption, and when it seems he scorns her gift, she punishes herself.

Leaving Las Vegas is one of the best films of the year, deserving of many Academy Award nominations. That such a film gets made is a miracle: one can see how this material could have been softened and compromised, and how that would have been wrong. It is a pure, grand gesture. That he is an alcoholic and she works the streets are simply the turnings they have taken. Beneath their occupations are their souls. And because Ben has essentially given up on his, the film becomes Sera's story, about how even in the face of certain defeat we can, at least, insist on loving, and trying.

Hookers often give themselves street names. Sera's makes me think of "Que Sera, Sera"-what will be, will be.