THE BASKETBALL DIARIES
A film review by John Walker
Copyright 1995 John Walker
My form of "rating": One test is how many times a film comes up in my mind afterward. THE BASKETBALL DIARIES came up *lots* of times. Arguably too many for comfort.
In brief: If you can take a film that tells a story and tells it well, I think you'll take BASKETBALL DIARIES. I don't know whether you'll "like" it, but it will be worth the trip.
But if you want explanations, if you want to know *why* somebody does something, BASKETBALL DIARIES will be much more problematical. Moreover, if you're tempted to lay explanations on facts that don't provide them, BASKETBALL DIARIES may provide you with too many temptations. (See the "Comments requiring spoilers," at the end.)
<>
The story is simple: Here's a kid in parochial high school--Jim Carroll (Leonardo DiCaprio) he's bright, non-stop wise-ass, not too concerned about whether his recreational activities may be against the law. He writes a diary all the time, he plays basketball, he drinks. His best friends don't write, but they do the rest. The drinking will be augmented by inhaling, the inhaling by injection, and all three by various other forms of ingestion scattered here and there.
Scratch school. To pay the bills, the recreational activities will turn to serious theft and body rental.
<>
Check out your high-school yearbooks. You should be able to find at least a couple of kids who took the same trips as Jim Carroll. It's just they didn't write, or else they didn't save their scribbled notes to write a book like THE BASKETBALL DIARIES.
Watching BASKETBALL DIARIES, I had the feeling of watching guys I'd known--not well, not friends necessarily. I might not have even trusted them very much, but they were part of my world nonetheless. What happened to them?
Maybe that's why the earlier part of BASKETBALL DIARIES had a stronger, very unpleasant affect on me. Jim is still in school, things are still apparently all right. His mother (Lorraine Bracco) nags a little, but that's a mother's job. Then she mentions he'll need a summer job -- for the "responsibility". If he can't find anything else, he'll have to work at the hotel where she works.
Somehow that was acutely depressing. Life is a long, dingy, high-school corridor--leading absolutely nowhere except a nowhere job. Charming. Have another beer.
When I was Jim's age, I kept my eyes resolutely averted from the end of the corridor. Besides, I knew, if no one else did, that the Navy would come to the rescue. Nonetheless, thinking about the future was not advisable. But without a faith that you could escape, and being too cocksure to imagine taking one of those nowhere jobs, what then?
Have another beer.
When Jim finally goes too far, somehow BASKETBALL DIARIES became more reassuring to me. OK, he's a junkie. He gets out of it, or he doesn't. He lives, or he dies. In a weird way, he's already escaped. Besides, being a junkie or a drunk is something other people do. They're my friends, but they're not me.
But being in high school with nowhere to go--*that* is reality. That's the razor's edge where *maybe* I could have gone the way Jim Carroll and his friends went.
<>
One thing may be off-putting or just incomprehensible for some people.
*When does this film take place?*
The settings are all right now--new cars, contemporary signs.
But Jim and his mother live in a slum building. Poor Irish in lower Manhattan today? The kid going to parochial school? Even if it's true, it doesn't fit our stereotypes. Also, there is nothing of a recreational drug scene. He goes from beer to sniffing cleaning fluid to junk. Well, it's not that simple, but we see no clubs, no glamour scene.
And the money! $40 is a big deal! Is this junkie Utopia?
I wondered whether it had really been in the 50s. Actually, it was the 60s. (I took a look at the book after finishing most of this review.) The glamour scene isn't happening yet; to some lights, Jim was a shade ahead of his time. And if $40 sounds trifling, remember that this was when starting wage was a dollar an hour.
Some reviewers have disliked this ambiguity, the implicit anachronisms.
The reason for the ambiguity is apparently a mixture of economics and a sort of truthfulness. The film was reportedly done for less than $4 million. To recreate the mid-60s in New York locations would, I take for granted, have added megabucks to the total. To change the story to make it fit the 90s scene could have produced a perfectly good film, but it would have had to be a different world from the one in Jim Carroll's book.
Strangely, though, I sort of liked not being sure when it was. There's an odd disjunction that fits well with going over the edge. How much of time and place do you retain when you're wrecked all the time? A 90s world, bargain-basement, devoid of much of the visible drug scene is an oddly science-fiction universe that seems to match its subject.
<>
If the folks who made BASKETBALL DIARIES did not waste money on backdrops, they did not scrimp on acting talent. Leonardo DiCaprio is simply great, and the rest of the cast is admirable.
DiCaprio makes makes Jim both appealing and real. He goes from kid racing along the edge, defiant, cocksure, all energy, to junkie trying hard not to crash too hard, not really in the same world as the rest of us, running on a very frayed tether.
In playing Jim's best friend Mickey, Mark Wahlberg (yes, Marky Mark) gives us a very nice street tough, not much morals, not much thought, but goofy and a lot of fun if he's on your side.
Patrick McGaw as Neutron looks more "conventionally" intelligent; he seems to have his eye on the main chance; he seems more clinical and detached and more under control than either Jim or Mickey could ever be.
Those three are basketball players, jocks, good looking, aggressive. Push comes to shove, James Madio as Pedro is probably a lot more like what most of us would be if we had to survive on the streets: quieter, weaker, making sure to stay in the company of the big guys.
Potentially, all four guys could be stock characters. But there's a reason why characters become stock: We know people like them. Unless you went to a *very* selective high school, all four will be familiar. In some respects, I would want to be around them. They're fun. In other respects, no way. Jim has a screw slightly loose; Mickey kicks people when they're down; Pedro is a sneak. They all take larceny for granted. I probably couldn't bring myself to dislike them--unless I or someone close to me got in their way. But *trust* them? Fat chance.
As Jim's mother, Lorraine Bracco arguably has the toughest role. She's not on screen very much. She's just there, sort of. After a while, she's knows something's badly wrong, but knows she doesn't how to deal with it.
Ernie Hudson as Reggie, a black friend of Jim's who plays basketball with him, is just good sense and good humor--but he can see what's going on because he used to do drugs, himself.
Bruno Kirby as Jim's coach, Swifty, is faintly but instantly dislikable. He's vague, sort of, continually hinting of meaning well but being, let's say, unreliable.
Altogether, a weird sense of reality in a drug-soaked film. And even Jim Carroll himself appears in an surreal cameo.
<>
Well, what are we to make of this? I'm told BASKETBALL DIARIES is good as an anti-drug film. Well, it certainly gives us a good picture of what one guy and his friends will do for their next fix. But will that persuade some kid who's dragged to it to see what happens to druggies? I can hear the reply: "I mean, hey, it's not for everybody. Most people can't handle it. But me, I got it under control."
I've also heard that the male prostitution thing is far from as clear as it might be. Jim is thoroughly heterosexual, what's the *effect* on him beyond initial disgust?
But I think all these things are beside the point. To dwell on the presumed effect, or to dwell on one particular aspect of the story is to miss that it's a story about one kid and what happened to him. The point is not whether others will learn from it.
The point is not about an aspect or a "problem" to be examined. It's about a *person*, a particular individual.
The point is not that we should understand him or his problem. The point is that we should get to know him a bit.
In that regard, the only question is, did it happen?
And there, of course, we can say that the book has been considerably tidied up into a more straightforward story. It's also been sanitized somewhat. Jim's not quite the amoral creep he can be in the book. He was also younger in real life; the book takes three years, and closes with him at 16 in 1966.
But how much of the book is true? Reading it, my instinctive suspicions arise. The drugs are true; the larceny is true; the great sex is highly suspect. We've got a 13-to-16-year-old writing this stuff, after all; teenagers are apt to embellish certain things, shall we say.
Yet we are all big boys and girls now, and we might as well recognize that it could all be true. (Or none, for that matter.) In any event, we've got a character here. A person. Even if purely fictional, he still *could* be someone we knew, someone we know.
I will cheerfully admit I have a great deal of ambiguity about a character like Jim Carroll, and about his friends. I don't think BASKETBALL DIARIES taught me anything about any of them, not about their defects or strengths, not about what they've gone through. I obtained no new "data" from BASKETBALL DIARIES. But the film brought him and them alive again in my life. I got to know them a bit better, or to renew the acquaintance anyway.
There's a lot to be said for that.
John Walker walkerj@access.digex.net
<>
In brief, Jim gets clean, and the film closes with him giving a reading/performance at a club of some sort--continuing the text from THE BASKETBALL DIARIES that he's been saying from time to time over the film.
Does that give some profound meaning to BASKETBALL DIARIES that it wouldn't have had otherwise? As I noted in "In brief": Are you tempted to lay on explanations when the facts don't provide one?
Well, reviewers aren't just tempted, they're driven. And so I read a number of folks who saw BASKETBALL DIARIES as a case of the old Art-and-drugs thing. Presumably, a) Jim Carroll's Art immunized him from the worst effects of drugs; or b) the drugs added something to his Art.
Without his Art, the drugs would have destroyed him. Without his drugs, his Art would not have been so great. Choose one. Say it Meaningfully.
Barf, retch, heave, on either account.
Yes, this is a cute, 19th-century debate that has mesmerized whole generations of artists, poets, drunks, and druggies. Yes, some major figures in the arts have been screwed up in particular ways that make one position plausible or the other.
The minimum that need be said is that it doesn't have much to do with BASKETBALL DIARIES. If you already take a position on the Art/Drugs issue, you can see Jim's story as supporting you. And there may be something to the idea that *something* in an addict's personality--some passion or drive--may provide the hidden resource than helps getting off the chemical of choice. But BASKETBALL DIARIES doesn't tell us that Jim's Art led through the dark night and out into the light. It certainly doesn't give us any reason to think that his writing was somehow elevated because of drugs. (Although he is clearly the type that would write about *anything* that presented itself, and life-and-death experiences make good topics for writing about.)
Perhaps Carroll has written something somewhere that gives rise to the Art-and-drugs stuff. But it doesn't show up in BASKETBALL DIARIES.
Arguably, Jim Carroll's story would have been much the same if his great passion had been rock or auto mechanics or computers or running or -- more to the point--basketball.
These are, after all, THE *BASKETBALL* DIARIES.
take care,
John Walker walkerj@access.digex.net
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews