Hoop Dreams Review

Steve James, Frederick Marx and Peter Gilbert set out to make a half hour short about playground basketball and came back five years later with something like two hundred and fifty hours of tape. What they caught is not a sports story. William Gates and Arthur Agee are both recruited out of the West Side to St. Joseph in the suburbs, the school Isiah Thomas came from, and coached by the same Gene Pingatore. William is the prospect, so the money is found for him. Arthur is not, so when the tuition help stops he is sent back to a public school and the film has its subject: a system that buys teenagers on speculation and writes them off on the same basis.

The footage is rough, shot on video and blown up, and it does not matter at all. The scenes that stay are domestic. Arthur's father buying drugs at the far end of the court his son is playing on. The Agee electricity cut off, then restored, then Sheila Agee finding out she has passed her nursing assistant exam and crying with her hands over her face. William's knee giving out, and the quiet negotiation about whether to play on it anyway.

At one hundred and seventy one minutes it never sags, because James cuts it as a novel rather than a report. Siskel and Ebert both called it the best film of 1994. The Academy's documentary branch left it off the ballot, which caused enough of a public row that the nomination process was rewritten. Thirty years on the film has outlasted every argument about it.