Basketball is only the cover...

Rating: 8/10 (6 May 2003)

In Hoosiers, one gets a view of 'flyover' country -- the part of America that people get through quickly on the way to somewhere else. Small-town life isn't as simple as it looks from urban America, and it wasn't very simple even in the 1950s. Human relationships are as complicated and intense in rural America as they are anywhere else. Just because few people are around doesn't mean that they can't get in one's face (to use an anachronistic term); one can't hide from any personal conflicts that arise from trying to do things differently, and one can't even get away from the town drunk. What is there is there, and one challenges other people's sensibilities and habits at considerable risk to one's happiness in such a place. Small towns allow privacy only at the price of all intimacy, and intimacy only at the price of all individuality. Trust me on this -- I live in a small town just outside of Indiana.
Hoosiers gets the visual feel of rural America in the 1950s, specifically Indiana, very well. It's apparent that the cinematography exploits the changing seasons of the Midwest as beautifully as can be done, rivaling Alfred Hitchcock's >The Trouble with Harry< (to be sure a very different movie) in part because preparation for basketball season begins in the fall and that basketball ends as winter gives way to the ugly, nasty time of early spring.
The sets are real high schools -- available cheaply because many school districts have abandoned high school buildings once a new, more modern high school has been built. (A little secret about Indiana -- the public buildings of a certain age in rural Indiana are essentially identical in Indiana for each type because such buildings all have the same architectural plan).
The basketball sequences are almost hackneyed. How much variety can one get out of winning, even by setting the scene thirty years (now fifty) years earlier)? Basketball is the pretext for personal conflicts -- such as the coach's ideas of how to win and the ideas of the supposed experts in town and that between the coach and the English teacher, who wants the star basketball player to seek an academic scholarship (requiring him to give up basketball) instead of a basketball scholarship, even though basketball is the surest source of lasting esteem in a small town that offers few economic opportunities other than working on the family farm and waiting to inherit the farm when Dear Old Dad dies. Most of all, we have conflict between characters and their worst tendencies -- selfishness, low self-esteem, alcoholism, and anger.
Hoosiers is a great movie, one of the best (better than, for example, >Field Dreams<, even if it falls short of >Raging Bull>) of involving sports, because human drama overpowers the sport. Thoroughly unpretentious, it catches rural Midwestern reality very well. It is neither saccharine nor maudlin, and it doesn't require that one be a basketball fan or to have much knowledge about basketball.