Director Martin Guigui’s screenplay for Sweetwater could easily be misconstrued as the parody of the real thing, if not for the deadening sincerity of the approach that borders on purely saccharine. Here is a worthy story – that of the Harlem Globetrotters, told through the perspective of its founding member and his fight to become the first Black person to sign with the National Basketball Association – entirely undone by its confused perspective. For Guigui, the far more interesting part of that story (despite a framing device that makes no sense in context) is about the white men who turned Nathaniel “Sweetwater” Clifton into a success. For Guigui, too, the reluctance of those white men to truly turn away from their racist contemporaries matters little, which is obviously a gargantuan misstep of its own.
It may not have mattered so much, though, if Guigui’s screenplay considered Sweetwater an equal part of this narrative alongside the other men in question. As written and played with a vague sort of determination by Everett Osborne, however, the man simply comes across as a construct for both a heavy-handed lecture on forgotten history and a social studies lesson about, and/or a reminder of, the prejudices met by Black Americans during a certain period in America’s regrettable past. Everything about Sweetwater and his story is so thoroughly basic and familiar that little beyond the biographical facts even resonates as either important or relevant. It seems tailor-made for an audience that may not want to see whatever the confrontational or provocative version of this story might look like.
The framing device, by the way, would have us believe that an older Sweetwater is telling the details of his life to a sports reporter (played in a brief, awkward cameo by Jim Caviezel) who happens to hail his cab while talking on his phone about Michael Jordan. The rest of the movie, though, is only partly told from the perspective of the younger Sweetwater, as a significant portion of it otherwise is split between at least three other men. Two of them are central to Sweetwater’s journey of being juggled back and forth between potential careers with the New York Knickerbockers, under the tutelage of coach Joe Lapchick (Jeremy Piven), and the skilled gimmickry of the Harlem Globetrotters, led by Abe Saperstein (Kevin Pollak).
Sweetwater must also deal with the hateful racism of the times, of course, including run-ins with Eric Roberts as a frightening, shotgun-wielding gas station proprietor and the blatant discrimination of the National Basketball Association (Richard Dreyfuss plays its president Maurice Podoloff, who at least has a good-enough business sense to recognize the money that could be lost if Sweetwater is ignored). If the focus here is rightly on Sweetwater, the film’s sense of priorities about who is meaningful in the whole equation is quite off-center, as it would have us believe that the stakes are primarily weighing on Abe or Joe or Knicks owner Ned Irish (Cary Elwes), rather than the Black man who shares a name with the movie.
Fatally, it also becomes all about the Final Game in a way that evades every other major concern – racial, historical, ethical or otherwise – that is established by the previous hour and a half. This isn’t surprising, though, since Sweetwater doesn’t even try to set itself apart from or above the same old thing we’ve seen too many times before.
Photo courtesy of Briarcliff Entertainment
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