Hardball

Looking for Chris Mathews's book, Hardball, I came across a film by the same title. The book I read in a few days, and found interesting. Matthews is fascinating, even if his penchant for interrupting guests in his teevee show, Hardball with Chris Matthews, is maddening. The film was okay.







Keanu Reeves plays a compulsive gambler who smokes (didn't inhale once during the film, though he did hold the smoke in his mouth) and drinks to excess. His life is a mess, a series of spasms aimed at making money, but which invariably put him on the edge of having lost too much. A major problem is that he owes money to people who take great exception to his owing them large sums, and who will go to any length to collect. Bad people. People who use bats and fists to enforce their rules.

Conor O'Neill owes $12,000 and sees no recourse – except to go to his yuppie friend, Jimmy Fleming, and ask for a loan. In short, Jimmy gives him a job coaching a bunch of housing-project smart-ass black kids, at $500 a week. The movie drags in spots, but there is continuity to the story. The pretty woman teacher is introduced, played by Diane Lane; the character is pointless and two-dimensional, and Lane delivers her usual performance: wooden, uninspired, relying on being female and a smile to pass the time.

In the end the story is fun, even inspiring, yet predictable. It does work; being predictable does not have to hamper a story. But what is wrong with the film is its reliance on stereotypes: the white guy figures out a way to make the dreams and hopes of the black kids work, he gets the girl, and everyone is grateful.