One on One
FILM: Love and Basketball
DIRECTOR: Gina Prince-Bythewood
STARRING: Sanaa Lathan, Omar Epps
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MONICA (SANAA LATHAN, RIGHT) TRIES TO JUGGLE TWO PASSIONS, INCLUDING HER FRIEND QUINCY (OMAR EPPS), IN LOVE AND BASKETBALL.
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I confess to being a basketball junkie. I fell in love with the game when I was
10 years old and my mother used to take me to shoot buckets on the blacktop at
Claiborne School in Gentilly Woods. When I was in my teens, I could spend hours
alone in a gym dribbling from one end of the court to the other, shooting,
rebounding and shooting again until I scored, then immediately off in the other
direction, invoking imaginary teams to devise competition, providing my own
play-by-play. When I was older and discovered that my skills would not take me
beyond the college level, I continued to play in adult leagues and in pick-up
games. To this day, the smell of a leather ball and the sound of a sneaker's
squeak on a hardwood floor are exquisite tastes of heaven. It's no accident,
then, that I so enjoyed Gina Prince-Bythewood's Love and Basketball, a
romantic drama about two kids who believe they have to choose between their
love of hoops and their love for each other.
Monica Wright (Sanaa Lathan) and Quincy McCall (Omar Epps) are Los
Angeles neighbors who meet on a basketball court at age 11. Both know no
greater pleasure than a jump shot drawing nothing but net or a runner spun off
the glass in heavy traffic. Eventually, they notice each other as something
more than mere playmates, and though they don't become sweethearts in high
school, they do become real pals, the kind who give each other rides and
unsolicited advice, the kind the other will seek out when a sympathetic ear is
absolutely essential. Monica and Quincy finally become lovers in college, when
both are playing for the University of Southern California Trojans. Theirs
should be the perfect match, for they were friends before they became sexual
partners, and they share a passion.
Alas, a sad combination of developments pushes them apart. Quincy's
family shatters on the shoals of marital infidelity, and Monica is not willing
to throw away her own basketball career to follow Quincy when he decides to go
pro before graduation.
Love and Basketball nicely eschews the standard formula that
ratchets up the athletic action toward a climactic championship game. There's
lots of basketball in the movie, but the narrative is far more concerned with
the characters' love for and dedication to the game than it is with the outcome
of any one contest or season. Keen viewers will notice lots of subtle touches:
the general prosperity of an African-American middle class that still has not
achieved true integration, the key differences in treatment afforded male and
female athletes -- even those of the very first rank.
Eventually, we realize that this is Monica's story, the story of a
gifted young woman's struggle to be treated, even by those who love her, as
they would treat a young man with comparable gifts. Monica's mother (Alfre
Woodard) doesn't attend her daughter's games. Mom worries that Monica won't
grow up ladylike, won't know how to "please a man," won't master requisite
domestic skills. Quincy is modern enough to have progressed beyond the
attitudes of his parents' generation, but even he resents that Monica can't "be
there" for him the way he thinks he deserves, even though it never would occur
to him to sacrifice his own basketball career for Monica the way he wants her
to for him. In short, Love and Basketball puts a very human face on a
longstanding feminist principle, and it does so without preaching or making
irredeemable villains of Quincy or the film's other male characters. The
picture ends not with a championship contest but with the beginning of a
regular-season game. The symbolism is brilliant. What's important is that
Monica takes the court. As she does so, the crowd rises in ovation. And you can
bet I'm among those cheering.
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