106) More Than a Game

More Than a Game (2008)

Director: Kristopher Belman

Starring: LeBron James, Dru Joyce, Romeo Travis, Sian Cotton, Willie McGee

Tonight I'm going to see my team, the Sydney Kings, play their first pre-season game. It will be their first game in over two years, since they were withdrawn from the NBL due to financial difficulties. So I'm quite excited about it and therefore had basketball on the brain today. I decided to watch a basketball movie and had two to choose from; Steve James's celebrated documentary Hoop Dreams, which unfortunately has a slightly inhibiting 170min run time, and Kristopher Belman's slightly less renowned More Than a Game.

The documentary follows the nine year journey of five talented young basketballers from Ohio to become the best high school basketball team in the country. Throughout the journey this group of friends are tested by the growing fame and expectation placed upon them, particularly the circus which surrounds LeBron James as the media recognises him as the next big thing.

Cinematically, there is nothing overly interesting about More Than a Game. Belman doesn't do anything overly different or exciting with the documentary form, but then, the expectation is not there for him to. This is, after all, a sports documentary. It may try to play to the "sport is a metaphor for life" kind of idea, but I am willing to bet more people saw this particular film because they were basketball fans or LeBron James fans than because they were interested in documentary.

One thing that hit me watching this film was that I really do not understand American high school sports. This team, the St.Vincent's/St. Mary's Fighting Irish, were playing games in packed out arenas. Their home games had to be moved from their high school to the local college because the high school's arena did not have the capacity to meet the demand. These were 16 and 17 year old students playing in front of crowds of as many as 10,000 people. Their games were being broadcast on television. This culture of high school sport does not exist in Australia. Generally high school teams in Australia will have no crowd to speak of. Perhaps your bigger private schools may insist on students going along to cheer their team on, but the idea that a city or community would get behind a high school team the way they would a professional team is a very foreign concept to me. It does make you realise how these athletes grow up to be the way they are. It can't have been easy for a guy like LeBron James to keep his ego in check when as a 17 year old, still in school, he has crowds of people wanting autographs and he's being interviewed by the media and seeing his face on TV and in the press. It is no wonder the guy's ego has just snowballed over the years.

About a year ago I was reading an article on NBA.com about how a number of NBA players were putting some of their money into film production. It specifically talked about three players. Carmelo Anthony's company Krossover Entertainment was one of the main backers for James Toback's brilliant documentary Tyson which I watched earlier in the year. Baron Davis, through his company Verso Entertainment, produced the slightly lower profile film Crips & Bloods: Made in America. I had to laugh though when the article finished by talking about how LeBron James, a man I find to be just the slightest bit arrogant, had also entered the film production game by backing a film about his favourite subject, himself. To be fair, More Than a Game is not just a film about LeBron James, it is about the five of them, but it still made me smile.

More Than a Game is interesting enough, providing you have an interest in basketball. But unlike the best documentaries, like Anvil: The Story of Anvil!, which manage to transcend their direct subject matter, in the case of this film there is ironically not much more than the game.