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Writer-director Ron Shelton's 1992 follow-up to the baseball comedy-drama
Bull Durham involves a different sport: basketball, as played on the neighborhood hustler circuit. Woody Harrelson is Billy Hoyle, a good shooter using his white complexion to fool black players into thinking he can be stomped in easy bets. Billy's banter-filled matchup against Sidney Deane (Wesley Snipes) on a public court leads to a partnership in which Sidney becomes Billy's manager, taking the white outsider on a tour of the tougher sections of Los Angeles, where he plays homeboys for a few bucks. Inevitably, the two come apart over their innate competitiveness, a situation that has to be reevaluated after Billy gets into trouble with some underworld creditors. Meanwhile, Billy's girlfriend (Rosie Perez) sits at home preparing herself for a maybe-someday date appearance on
Jeopardy. As with all of Shelton's sports-related movies (
Tin Cup, his script for
The Best of Times),
White Men Can't Jump is less about the fine points of the game than it is the rules by which players survive it. The script is literate and crackling with wit and satire (a scene in which a politician sponsors a black-white "solidarity" game is hilarious). The actors are entirely in sync, and the scenes under and around the hoops are a thrill to watch.
--Tom Keogh
A resourceful, sneaky-fast comedy about playground basketball. Ron Shelton, the writer and director, focusses on grown men trying to make a living at a boy's game, and he does full justice to the sweet absurdity of that enterprise. He keeps his eye on the fine points of playground culture and lets the story's meaning-and its humor-emerge from the details. The heroes, Sidney (Wesley Snipes) and Billy (Woody Harrelson), are addicted to the game. As a two-man team, they venture into the tough, hostile inner-city neighborhoods of Los Angeles and try to hustle the kings of the local courts. It's a great con: everyone assumes that Billy can't play the speedy, shake-and-bake style of black playground ball. Shelton and his crew (which includes cinematographer Russell Boyd and the editor Paul Seydor) have put together basketball sequences that capture the free-flowing rhythms of the game. The two-on-two contests here give us the delicious feeling a player gets when he's
almost out of control: flying but lucid. Harrelson's performance is rich, subtle, and delicately funny. And Snipes is just amazing: everything he does seems to leap off the screen. Shelton orchestrates the narrative like a veteran point guard: he's a wily pro with a streak of playground showmanship, and that's an ideal style for movies as well as for basketball. The picture has a generous spirit and a deep appreciation of play, and it moves with a distinctive funky grace: it takes things as they come and trusts itself to handle them. Also with Rosie Perez, Tyra Ferrell, Kadeem Hardison, and Marques Johnson. The terrific soundtrack features music by Aretha Franklin, Jimi Hendrix, James Brown, and Ray Charles. -Terrence Rafferty
Copyright © 2006
The New Yorker
