Rating:
N/A
Release Date:
29 & 30th September 2013(Raindance)
Director:
Andrew Cohn, Davy Rothbart
There’s a common perception that films centred on American based sports are destined not to do well here in Britain where we prefer football to be played with feet and baseball is, well, just not cricket. There are of course exceptions, such as golden era Kevin Costner’s baseball ghosts drama Field of Dreams and last year’s Moneyball, but even acclaimed documentary Hoop Dreams failed to receive similar adoration on the European side of the Atlantic. It’s perhaps a good job then that new documentary Medora uses basketball only as a base upon which to rest it’s telling tale of modern America and the plight of its numerous small towns.
The aforementioned Hoop Dreams is a good reference point, focussing as the film does, on a group of poverty-stricken basketball players using their on-court time as a way of escaping an otherwise challenging existence. Sadly for this plucky bunch of ball players this is where the similarity ends. For they are not destined for NBA stardom with all that that brings, their results are very much at the other end of the spectrum, the San Marino of high school basketball teams in fact, winless in the previous season, record defeats and racking up another unenviable losing streak. The camera’s are there to catch each morale-sapping defeat as well as by the side of the young individuals who make up the team as they take us on a tour of their home lives and in so doing, the life of a forgotten American town.
We travel through deserted streets once teeming with locals and visitors alike, closed factories and power plants that used to provide employment for entire communities, boarded up shops and restaurants forced into closure, and the near-empty trailer parks known only as area’s to avoid on account of ‘meth heads’.
We’re invited into the lives of these teenagers, witnesses to their own personal trials in that all important graduation year – we even get to go to Homecoming. Along the way it’s not hard to warm to these characters, dealt an unfairly difficult hand in life and rooted in a town that offers little in way of escape. Their options are slim and we see each of them casually tread the path of their future, one that’s always defined by their past. Dylan has never met his father and wants to work to ensure other children won’t face a similarly hard adolescence; Rusty’s parents were never around either owing to alcoholism or ignorance, forcing him to drop-out of school before his 15th birthday. There’s Robby too, blessed with a family unit but struggling academically.
Following the team, their coach and this community we see a part of America often overlooked in films. There is no sprawling shopping centre or high rise buildings, no iconic cinematic Americana to speak of at all. What there is however, is a sense of community pride, one instilled in their tiny school and invested in the hopes of the basketball team. It’s what prevents the school being consolidated into a giant county-engulfing one and what keeps these teenage boys turning up week in week out to pull on their kits and face another humiliating defeat at the hands of a school 10 times their size.
There’s a prevailing sense of inevitability coursing through the film about the fate of such towns, tucked away from the highways and skyscrapers. There’s footage of an Obama address acknowledging the hard times faced while remaining hopeful for the times ahead. With Medora, directors Andrew Cohn and Davy Rothbart have echoed those sentiments, establishing the difficulties but forcing through elements of hope, embodied in no little part by the members of the basketball team.