THE BASKETBALL DIARIES
A film review by Raymond Johnston
Copyright 1995 Raymond Johnston
Directed by Scott Kalvert Based on the memoir by Jim Carroll Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Bruno Kirby, Lorraine Bracco, Mark Wahlberg
The motion picture camera just loves some people. Leonardo DiCaprio is one such person. Put him in a scene, any scene, and he becomes the center of attention. You have to go back to James Dean or the young Robert DeNiro to find somebody that had such an easy rappore with the big screen. In his first top-billed role, Leonardo DiCaprio has come to the forefront of young American actors.
Mark Wahlberg, the artist formerly known as Marky Mark, proves himself to be a good character actor. He catches a gritty, streetwise flavor that lends a sorely needed sense of authenticity to THE BASKETBALL DIARIES. Wahlberg might have found his niche is punky tough guy roles. No doubt, he will be artfully reprising this kind of character for years to come.
Juliette Lewis is a more versatile actor. She risks falling into typecasting by doing another version of the white trash character that she has done in her last several films. These performances, along with fine work by Bruno Kirby and Ernie Hudson are a few of the reasons to see THE BASKETBALL DIARIES. Unfortunately, the reasons not to see the film are a much longer and more convincing list.
Jim Carroll's classic novel of coming of age in the 1960s is transposed into the 1990s. All of the flavor of Carroll's novel gets lost among a series of anachronisms. One character finds a beat-up revolver, and this makes him a tough guy on the street. Much more powerful weapons have been common for years among ever younger criminals. The teenagers get high on furniture polish, when in the 1990s real drugs are readily available everywhere in New York. Current urban problems like crack and AIDS are not mentioned in the film. A major scene takes place in a subway bathroom, when subway bathrooms have been shuttered for over a decade. Even the whole sense of the young white Catholic schoolboys going around New York in his school uniform has vanished through waves of white flight to the suburbs. If the story needed to be updated, a better job needed to be done. It seems as if the film makers were simply too cheap to paint over the graffiti and rent the old cars for the street scenes. Relocating the story from the middle class north of Manhattan to the seedy Lower East Side also didn't add anything more to the story except a bunch of cliches.
Those complaints aside, some of which perhaps would only annoy native New Yorkers, the film stumbles badly in its overall structure. Jim Carroll's book is a series of loosely related incidents. The film makers change it into a linear anti-drug story that is not really faithful to the books irreverent and wistful tone. Beautifully funny scenes of teenagers causing trouble become turgid episodes in REEFER MADNESS like anti-heroin cautionary tale. A judgmental Reagan era just-say-no feeling has been injected into the aimless and amoral goings on of Carroll's life. Anybody that saw the German film CRISTIANE F. has seen this all before.
Director Scott Kalvert's experience as a rock video director is evident in a few disjointed scenes. Narrative elements become filler between psychedelic montages set to alternative rock music. A scene of a burning basketball hoop is a great image, but it seems forced into the story just to create a good rock video effect. Some of the music comes from Jim Carroll's own band. These images will probably wind up in rock videos that will be better than the film. The sound track album is by far better than the film too.
A better attempt at adapting an unadaptable novel about street life in New York was done with LAST EXIT TO BROOKLYN featuring Jennifer Jason Leigh. Martin Scorcese's MEAN STREETS also creates a much more coherent and authentic urban vision, using much of the same cut-to-the-beat technique. For an anti-drug film that manages to be good cinema, Otto Preminger's THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN ARM is still tops in the genre.
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