Written and directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood
There’s love, there’s basketball, but there’s also a whole lot more in Gina Prince-Bythewood’s Love & Basketball, the story of two kids-next-door who struggle to find each other amidst their own hoop dreams and relationship with their parents.
It makes for a love story spanning more than a decade as Monica (Sanaa Lathan) and Quincy (Omar Epps) struggle to make it to their respective leagues, and while Lathan and Epps provide a realistically awkward and winding bit of romance, the true strength of Love & Basketball lies in how elegantly it expands to be a more encompassing drama that weaves in ideas of masculinity, the fallible humanity of parents, feminism, individualism, and much more.
Prince-Bythewood weaves it all together with great elegance and the scenes just seem to fall into place, the flow of her movie always in rhythm with never a toe out of bounds. That’s down to the strength of her own writing, because the movie’s about more than just the central coupling, with several strong duets throughout.
Dennis Haysbert steps in as Qunicy’s dad Zeke, a former pro and Quincy’s idol, and as the years pass, the back-and-forth between these two men about how to be a mensch, both for yourself and those in your life, is both poignant on its own, and in the wider context.
Similarly, a fraught relationship between Monica and her mother Camille (Alfre Woodard) opens up a dialogue about sacrifice and compromise in one’s personal pursuits, as Camille’s embrace of homemaker status has Monica bristling on her mother’s behalf and projecting frustration that the same is expected of her.
There are deep characters who together eloquently explore rich themes in Love & Basketball and it makes for a much more engaging experience than you might anticipate from reading the box. Prince-Bythewood has real, whole people trying to figure out a life for themselves before they can begin figuring it out with another person, and while it’d be even more simplistic and on the nose, they ought to just have called it Life & Basketball.
But it’s still a romance, of course, and looking at it with a modern lens, the relationship between Monica and Quincy, tested and sustained from a place of childhood innocence and trust, feels quaint and warm to the touch because how we date now is so fractured and uninvested, the hegemony of dating apps so geared towards the fleeting, shiny, and new. The romance of Love & Basketball is not without its small clichés, but it can melt your heart if you let it.
With its clear-eyed depiction of growing love and how it fits into a bigger, more complicated life, Love & Basketball is a movie that refuses to be put in a box and like its characters, walks its own path and succeeds on its own terms.
Mikkel Frederiksen 