How often must women sacrifice in romantic dramas? Whether it be a piece of themselves or an entire dream of the future, Hollywood has long presented us the long-suffering wife who got pregnant too early or settled for marriage out of fear of bucking societal mores. Think of Mrs. Robinson, the bitter housewife who starts an affair with a young man in The Graduate. We learn that she had once studied art but had to give it up after getting pregnant in the backseat of a car. With the recent reversal of Roe v. Wade, it is important that we are given stories about women who don’t settle, don’t sacrifice a dream just because that is what is expected. Their dreams and ambitions are just as important as their male counterpart’s.
According to Roxane Gay, we as moviegoers “have to make a Faustian bargain in order to enjoy most love stories. We have to pretend a woman is making a good choice when she is, in fact, making a terrible, unnecessary choice.” Stories where women end up with both a partner and a career are few and far between. And speaking of Faustian choices, check out Maggie Gyllenhaal’s devastating The Lost Daughter (2021) if we want to see cinematic hell for a woman who chooses wrongly. But it doesn’t have to be this way and Gina Prince-Bythewood’s 2000 film, Love & Basketball, proves that you can hit your baskets and have your man too.
Prince-Bythewood understands her milieu well. A high school basketball player who received offers to play from colleges, the writer-director instead attended film school at UCLA and cut her teeth working on the “Cosby Show” spinoff, “A Different World.” After shopping her script to indifferent studios, Spike Lee took interest and helped Prince-Bythewood develop Love & Basketball with a large budget and the freedom to bring her vision to the big screen.
From the start, Love & Basketball feels novelistic, told in four distinct parts, or “quarters” as Prince-Bythewood divides them. We first meet protagonists Monica and Quincy in 1981, when they are 11 years old. Monica has just moved next door to the cocky Quincy, whose dad plays for the Los Angeles Clippers. She puts him in his place on the basketball court, an interaction that leads to a physical confrontation and then an awkward first kiss.
The movie then propels into the future as we watch the teenaged Monica (Sanaa Lathan) and Quincy (Omar Epps) foster a friendship. Quincy is a great basketball player, chased by many colleges, but his predilection for the ladies has his mother (Debbi Morgan) worried that if he isn’t careful, he will get one pregnant and be bound to her. Meanwhile, Monica is also a skilled ball player, but her tempestuous anger and fully defined independent streak makes the college scouts shy away. Quincy and Monica serve as a bedrock for one another and when his parents’ quarreling gets to be too much, Quincy leaves via his bedroom window, enters Monica’s room and sleeps on her floor. The relationship between these characters progressively slowly and naturally. The meet-cute is fleeting and by the time they become a couple at USC – where they both play basketball – in the film’s third quarter, the pairing feels lived-in and earned.
Prince-Bythewood packs a lot into her film, but she is not going to let Monica be content simply standing by her man. When she chooses basketball over Quincy at point when he is struggling with familial drama, her independence fuels an apocalyptic tailspin for the young man. In a lesser film, Monica would be expected to surrender her dreams to prop up her guy, but not in Love & Basketball. Instead, she feels the repercussions for her choices. “I’d never ask you to choose,” she shouts at Quincy when he threatens to dump her. “I’m a ballplayer. If anybody knows what that means, it should be you.”
Love & Basketball explores much more than gender. Prince-Bythewood turns a sharp eye to affluence, telling a story about Black characters that doesn’t resort to the typical tropes that tells those stories. Monica resents her mother (Alfre Woodard) for forgoing dreams of being a caterer so she can stay home and take care of family. This conflict threads through the entire as her mother dismisses basketball and hopes that Monica will grow out of her tomboy phase. Meanwhile, Quincy begins to realize that his father (Dennis Haysbert) isn’t the man he once idolized, a revelation that rocks his entire worldview.
Sticking close with Quincy and Monica through their successes and struggles, while deeply caring for both characters, Love & Basketball still endures more than 20 years later. Not only is it a compelling story but all the performances are deeply felt. The film proves that a genre, often written off as banal, can appeal to all sorts, a veritable slam dunk of filmmaking if there ever was one.
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