Love and Basketball is a romantic basketball movie released in 2000. The story starts when Monica and her family have just moved in a new neighborhood where Quincy and his family live. After a basketball game, they become good friends. The same interest brings them closer and closer. On their way to success, they overcome many obstacles and finally get together. According to the storyline, it is obvious that the love story is actually the main theme of this movie.
In this movie, the director tells a love story. From this perspective, this movie is similar to He Got Game, because they both use basketball as a means to demonstrate something else. The big difference between them is that in He Got Game, the director uses basketball to show race issues. The director of Love and Basketball uses plot to portray their relationship. This movie is very straightforward to this theme by showing a basketball game between two main characters who later become a couple. Then the director shows how they fall in love, how they get into troubles, how they break up, and at last how they come together again. On their way to maturity, they learn how to deal with relationships from their parents as well as from each other. It’s a growth opportunity for both of them to learn how to love. Just as in the name Love and Basketball, love comes first in this movie. The way that this movie treats basketball is like the way Denzel in He Got Game tells his son to “use basketball as a tool.”
Some people may argue this movie is about race. But I do not consider it this way. It is true that in this movie African Americans play main characters, but using African American actors in a movie does not make race become the theme of the movie. In He Got Game, the race issue is extremely obvious. In many scenes, the race issue is raised in dialogue. Characters in He Got Game are actually talking about race. On the contrary, there is not a single line in Love and Basketball about race. On the other hand, reason for showing how African Americans are treated unequally in He Got Game is to show the dark side of their lives. But both of the main characters in Love and Basketball are upper class people. They live in big houses and have respectable jobs and a stable income. Moreover, almost all the characters in this movie are played by African Americans, and the only exception is Monica’s coach from her university. As for the coach, she never says anything against Monica’s race. She treats everyone equally. This is absolutely different from what is in He Got Game, in which many whites say things against African Americans. In this sense, it is not a movie about race at all.
In some ways, this movie seems like a biopic, for example by dividing its plot according to time period. I think this is because the director wants to make this movie more realistic. This doesn’t seem to help to characterize any theme of this movie. On the contrary, it confuses audiences. It breaks the story into pieces with nothing to connect them. Especially when the characters’ costumes change, it took me a while to recognize them and make connections between them.
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