THE BASKETBALL DIARIES
A film review by Serdar Yegulalp
Copyright 1995 Serdar Yegulalp
R, 102 m.
Adapting Jim Carroll's unappetizing memoir of a Catholic-school boyhood gone very wrong was probably not a good idea; the book didn't have very much to say in the first place except how bad it was to be young and depressed and selling one's body for heroin. (Hubert Selby Jr. and William Kennedy have explored the same kind of territory in more penetrating detail, but this isn't a book review, it's a movie review.)
And so we come to the movie, which is, if anything, even less insightful. It's a foul-tasting, unconvincing story that depends about half on cliche' Hollywood shorthand and half on puerile teen-age angst. What's sad is that in the middle of the movie's mess are some very good performances. Leonardo DiCaprio, as Carroll himself, does a fine job with some truly terrible material, and it's not his fault that in the end he comes out looking somewhat miscast, I guess.
The movie wastes no time in showing us how, right from the start, his options are limited and ugly. Jim plays on the basketball team of St. Vitus' high school in New York, a place painted in such unappetizing detail that we are instantly certain the movie is stacking the deck. One particular element--the character of a priest--is depicted so viciously that I wondered if we'll ever see a sympathetic man of the cloth in a movie ever again. Just wondering.
Things start to sour (like they weren't already). Jim starts experimenting with homosexuality and drugs, and pretty soon his mother (Lorraine Bracco, again very good despite the fact she's given no character of any substance to portray) throws him out. This is the only thing in the movie that she does that shows she even exists. The movie only gets uglier and somehow also less interesting from there, as Jim's downward slide gets the kind of sleazy treatment that crummy Hollywood cops-and-vice movies typically only indulged in. There are also a whole plethora of sullen anti-establishment cliches, like the scene where he saves a dying friend by liberating him from the hospital (which got bad laughs from the audience I watched it with).
The final stretch of the movie is also relentlessly predictable, showing how Carroll is redeemed (if that's the word for it) with undue haste, and then wastes no time in showing us how his art has benefited because of said suffering. On the basis of what we're offered, I was hoping he'd pick up basketball again.
There is a little-seen movie called CHRISTIANE F., made in Germany, about a young girl who becomes hooked on heroin at the age of fifteen and ultimately turns tricks to purchase it. That movie had genuine horror and a real sense of what it must be like to sell off one's body and soul for drugs. This movie doesn't have a clue.
-- syegul@ix.netcom.com
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