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Reviews - More Than a Game & Five Minutes of Heaven
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Kristopher Belman’s documentary More Than a Game has received a lot of comparisons to Steve James’s Hoop Dreams, often cited as that picture with a happy ending. While this may be an easy producer pitch, the notion oversells Game’s depth.
Belman’s work centers on a young LeBron James and his teammates from Akron, Ohio’s St. Vincent-St. Mary’s High School. Through four years, James and his crew were a dominant force to be reckoned with, blowing out teams and winning titles. However, it wasn’t always that way. Before the Fab Five were champs, they were nobodies, just a bunch of basketball fans shooting hoops together and being best friends. This element of Belman’s doc is the most intriguing. A lot is made in the media of how athletics, particularly amongst the top contenders, robs teenagers of their youth, forced to face a cold world of loss and disappointment. The truth is quite clearly the opposite, at least in this instant.
James and his pals Dru, Romeo, Sian and Willie are a bunch of goofballs, laughing at the stupidest things, taking joy in being buds. Their bond, along with the growing admiration of Dru’s father, the team’s eventual coach and mentor, is captivating. They are a family, complete with major fights (Dru’s possible benching, Willie’s early dismissal of his future friends). This isn’t merely the LeBron James show but a celebration of boys being boys.
Where More Than a Game falters is in the deeper realms of its story. The complications James’s fame brought to his companions and his daily routine are touched upon but faintly. A son of a single mother, fighting from pay check to pay check, and then ending up on the cover of “Sports Illustrated” had to have been a dramatic moment in this young man’s life and Belman is more interested in building up to the big championship showdown. That eventual game is old hat, it is the titular More Than that is interesting and sadly underplayed.
More Than a Game opens at AMC Uptown and Alderwood Mall 16 tomorrow.
German director Oliver Hirschbiegel is a master of claustrophobia. With Downfall and The Experiment, Hirschbiegel delved into worlds that forced characters to interact, stuck with nowhere else to go. That same anxiousness and dread creeps into his latest, the small-scale drama Five Minutes of Heaven. In the picture, two characters are reunited for the first time in decades. The last time Alistair (Liam Neeson) met Joe (James Nesbitt) was not under the best of circumstances. In that encounter, Joe witnessed Alistair shoot his older brother in cold blood, an act that led these young boys into drastically new places.
As adults, Alistair has moved on, or so it seems. He is a successful businessman, wealthy, intelligent and full of regret, but not the kind that keeps him up at night. Joe is the opposite, blamed by his parents for not stopping the killing, he has grown detached from society. Despite a wife and kids, Joe’s rage consumes him. When a television program specializing in bringing former enemies together offers the chance for these men to meet again, Joe seizes, bringing a loaded gun with him.
The premise is right up Hirschbiegel’s alley, yet he doesn’t quite connect with it. The tension that brews before their inevitable face-off occurs is the film’s finest achievement. Neeson’s tranquil state belying a nervous energy beneath. A lengthy interview piece, done in one astonishing take, reveals his mindset, both then and now. He was but a boy, and when it came to terrorist actions, all that mattered were whether or not his people were being killed. The others were just that, others. Nesbitt brings the opposite composure, frantic and with a rolling anger that sizzles up to a vitriolic outburst. However, Hirschbiegel, Nesbitt and writer Guy Hibbert play Joe as too much of a mad-man. His internal thoughts, and a narration that stumbles into the tedious and obvious, give the game away. Time and again the suspense is undercut by a blatant statement of emotions.
This is an even larger dissapointment when taking into consideration the performances. Nesbitt, who a moment or two plays things too broad, is an intriguing figure here. His eyes bulge with disgust when he learns Alistair is nearby, and his rage ready to be unleashed at any second. Neeson, as always, is wonderful. His grace as an actor, and effortless ability to make a murderer sympathetic, is quite the feat. Hirschbiegel may have made a flawed movie but it is one of the few focusing on the Northern Ireland conflict that manages to remain balanced.
Five Minutes of Heaven opens exclusively at Landmark’s Varsity Theatre tomorrow.
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