Passion on the Court

The Heart of the Game

Directed by Ward Serrill

The ideal non-fiction narrative never hesitates to attack its material. Last year's sleek sports doc Murderball was primarily compelling because it dared viewers to withhold sympathy for the ferocious quadriplegic rugby stars, who rejected the handicap label by directly challenging anyone crass enough to consider them socially defunct. The newest entry into this genre has equal commercial viability and purports to be family friendly, but The Heart of the Game-a by-the-numbers chronicle of how women basketball students at Seattle's Roosevelt High aimed to win their statewide championship-is far more brutal than surface inspection reveals. Rapper-cum-Oscar prince Ludacris provides a strangely uninflected narration throughout that, coupled with team coach Bill Resler's tendency to explain the game through a variety of wild animal metaphors, often feels like watching a nature documentary about hunting tactics in the African savanna. Turns out this works: The title refers not to a Disneyfied moral tale, but rather to the visceral beating of blood battered organs nestled within these powerful athletes' nimble forms.

Thankfully, the last thing director Ward Serrill wants is to create a hypersexualized environment. His storytelling firmly distinguishes between teenage femininity issues that plague the players and the cold, tactical skill exercised on court. Such compartmentalized observation becomes absolutely necessary once the story really takes off, settling in on the travails of 17-year-old Darnellia Russell, the star player of Roosevelt's Roughriders team, who suffers from poor academic performance and an impoverished African-American household, but manages to emerge as a local celebrity thanks to her unrivaled courtroom agility. When Russell gets pregnant at 18 and chooses to have the child, she is later banned from returning to the team by a bunch of proverbial White Men in Suits who run the state competitions.

The ensuing court battle and final championship scenes are riveting. Russell's talent is an enigma that her coach earnestly aims to decipher with a sportscaster's eye. Resler himself is a fascinating character study; his rambling team strategies oscillate between war room vigilance and existentialism. It doesn't hurt that he looks a little like a late-1950s Orson Welles, and lives a lifestyle ripe with metaphor (he owns a black cat and thus favors rationality over fate; curls up by the fireplace to study Einstein because, clearly, the rules of the game require similarly rigorous scientific inquiry).

Resler's passionate support for Russell and the Roughriders suggests the transferability of high school politics to other walks of life, especially once the scandal starts to generate headlines. As a native Seattleite, I appreciated the film's local flourishes, like the inclusion of a folksy AM talk show where listeners debate communal issues as though tackling global affairs. The city's diverse population sets the stage for passionate political grandstanding across class barriers. That bubbling racial tension makes The Heart of the Game a thematic cousin of the simpleminded saga Crash, which comes to mind mostly because along with Heart's Ludacris, Matt Dillon, another actor in that epic misfire, narrates the forthcoming soccer documentary, Once in a Lifetime. These men seem to have found a more appropriate medium for emotional manipulation than the facile showcasing of racial epithets. The medium? Reality, of course.