The Hustle of “Hustle”

Fifteen minutes into Netflix's latest version of “Here's something to watch while you knit” “Hustle”. I knew what the movie was about and where it was going. Matter fact I knew what it was about and where it was going from the trailer and none of the movies surprises or its comforts were able to make that work any better for me. It opens with an “Up in the Air” like montage featuring Sandler looking like a portable bag of laundry dropped into one strange bed after another, in one strange city after another to watch one player after another break his heart. We see isolation, loneliness, a man constantly away from his family. We also see personality, perseverance, “hustle”. When he comes back with his report on what he has saw - specifically a player named Haas everyone else is high on save Sandler's Stanley Sugerman - we know hes a scout, and not to soon after that he is a very put upon scout. There's a nice subplot story to be told here about the cogs in the NBA corporate machine and the abuses they endure and/or the combine and the way it treats players like livestock, but it/they become the first casualties in an ongoing extermination of any idea that might make this story interesting. Capitalism, race, the loss of craftsmanship and fundamentals these are all interesting approaches to discussing basketball today obvious and yet still unexplored in the history of basketball movies save by Spike Lee. It borders on criminal to me to make a basketball movie in 2022 and have the best idea you can come up be a “Rocky” movie starring Adam Sandler.

Adam Sandler ends up the movies greatest strength and it's greatest weakness. There's something to be said about how much Sandler resembles Sylvester Stallone in quality of self deprecating nature. They both have mastered this hang-dog look, even moreso as their age is accompanied by wrinkles and bodies that feel every bit of their age. They understand that rage that desire to want to prove without being loud while simultaneously being loud with a profoundness very few people could ever understand. Meagerness/Meekness these are qualities of the underdog in cinema. The guy who doesn't want any trouble but can cause immense trouble has been a on screen favorite since the Golden age of westerns. Sandler posseses this quality like Stallone naturally. In fact natural-ness could be argued to have been a defining trait of Sandlers since he started dramatic acting. Unlike many of his comedian contemporaries who so clearly TRY in both choices of roles and films and in choices in acting - Sandler just seems to move towards what moves him and when he arrives, he arrives ready, open, and willing to let the story and what is there take him to where he needs to go. To use a basketball phrase ; He let's the game come to him. It shows here in all his choices. When hes going to raise his inflection, when hes going to slide back into that old familiar scrappy energetic Adam Sandler, and when hes going to snap out of it. It's in his walk, in his ownership of his body and his insecurities, its all on display in increasingly vulnerable and bare performances. I may not be as high on Sandler as others, but I recognize a blue collar like approach to the work that's endearing and in and of itself an attractive quality as it pertains to his stardom and career, but Adam Sandler is still a white man. Any basketball movie featuring a white man in this very black but also very anti black world, just cannot afford to wash over that as if it doesn't exist by meeting aesthetic quotas in regards to representation. Having black people be featured dominantly where they are dominant in service to a scribe who writes a story about an two underdog white men who will beat the odds -one in particular against yet another cocky black player is defeating to any goodwill I may have towards the rest of the story. It's not as much Sandlers and Co's fault( Lebron James and Maverick Carter co-produced this ) as much as it is the fault of exhaustion. Exhaustion with nearly a century of cinema where white men are centered in stories that beg for the consideration of the people it treats as background.

White men have long had an issue taking a back seat, when everything they've told themselves says that seat is reserved for everyone but them. I’m not specifically talking about Sandler, more a generalized sense of the history of cinematic and other forms of narrative storytelling. Any chance white men have to place themselves at the center of it all they will invited or not. Their resilience in this regard should be matched by our collective vigilance, but many times it eventually gives way to exhaustion. After all, the resources, the keys, the gates, the real estate is mostly owned by them, and they can deploy all of them to overwhelm on multiple fronts. It becomes tiring countering everything everywhere all the time, especially when it's so cool and saccharine and non-threatening as Adam Sandler and stories about underdogs. Throw in a charming and willing to try and make it work Latifah as a one dimensional housewife, a bi-racial spirited child, a legion of old and new black hoopers and analyst as also charming props and maybe you might forget how hollow and old hat this all is in the sense of story. The gymnastics “Hustle” has to do to avoid even its most basic and plain truths hurt it's story and its characterizations. Ben Foster's Vince Merrick an entitled son to Robert Duvall's compassionate owner ( A trope that needs to die see “The Replacements”, “Blue Chips”, and the ghost of a father in Any Given Sunday ) looks lost as his hijinks feel completely unconnected or tied to anything tangible. There's implications of a Gladiator/Road to Perdition type deal where Merrick might be jealous of Sandler's Sugerman as a surrogate son who has a better relationship with his father than he does, but that is woefully unexplored, and in that case Sandler's character being black would lend understanding and relief without words needing to be spoken. Many of these situations would explain themselves with a black character being an outisder in this same strange world where black people are almost only on the playing side and not the organizational or operational side. As it stands, Merrick's hate (and its very hateful/spiteful) is just arbitrary and weird, especially since all of his actions actively hurt the team. With any background on him this would make sense, but the movie isn't interested in that either. Kermit Wilts (Played by actual NBA player Anthony Edwards ) has no visible traits other than shit talking. No other personality, defining or driving motive other than to be a black foil for our white hero. At least Apollo Creed had some version of interiority. The movie cares so little about its convictions that even when it repeats over and over again that Bo's main and seemingly only weakness is his lack of a developed thick skin (which Kermit exploits by getting under it) it abandons that theme unceremoniously when the big comeback scene happens. In their final battle Kermit says nothing to rile Bo the whole time and so even in his victory the question must be asked what did he learn? This is a double sin as its simultaneously hobbles Juancho Herangomez's character development, and disappears even Kermit's one defining trait leaving him nothing but a loser at the end.

I really do understand why folks find this movie appealing. It's a steady Adam Sandler ( himself a bit of an underdog considering how most people categorize his career then and now) continuing to grow right before our eyes becoming one of the more fascinating and interesting actors of our time. It's Queen Latifah getting to play just a bit outside of type and doing it with a certain kind of wilful glee that brings a smile to one's face. It's the beat down man, a scout, a small link in a great big chain driving around in a Chevy Malibu somehow able to fund all these various basketball “doctors” and hotel stays by himself without the aid of a basketball team and their corporate money because he's a doer, and a humble man, the great sweet spot that is the underdog. Last but of course not least it's basketball! “We love this Game” is the NBA's slogan, and very few slogans are as simple and true. I love this game, I love it a little too much to watch a movie that centers it and the aspect of scouting and doesn't really talk much about how to deploy actual skill, how to define it in a player. A movie featuring a scout finding a phenom that has no interest in talking about things like whether or not Bo is a traditional center who needs to learn to play more of an outside game with more finesse, or ( more likely ) a player that has a lot of skill behind the three point line, and moving with the ball that needs to learn to play more traditionally under the rim, or get tougher under it. When training there is no talk of what they're trying to train him for or what they want him to do as hes clearly in shape and looks the exact same after all this training. These are details that add to authenticity and engage us further into the story. I was frequently confused about Bo's level. Is he a phenom or a great rotational player? Would you fight this hard for a role player? If he's a phenom, there'd be no way anyone would be dissuaded by the fact that he gets a little ruffled when it gets hot, and truthfully if he was, while it may show up in regards to the loss, he would still be ballin regardless. How many phenomenonal talents have we seen who have weak constitutions or a soft personality, no one denies their talent. Why are we still talking about or allowing the white conservative talking point that being a trash talker is synonous with being a villain, especially when movies almost always make that type of villain black? While I wanted to like or maybe even love this movie I was deterred constantly at every turn by a movie which jettisoned almost every single interesting or fascinating plot point or direction for another that was tired and familiar. Like the way it ignores its interesting female characters be it Queen Latifah or Heidi Gardner as Kat Merrick the daughter of Rex, Sister of Vince - in a way that leaves so much on the table it makes her interactions with Sugarman weirdly off key. My issue with hustle is not just tied to it's impoverished approach to representation, or it's centering of a white man, or it's lack of follow through. It's in its hollow attempt to resurrect a story that had already been told and told better years ago. In essence this movie's “hustle” is not in any workmanship or craft sense, but it's willingness to try to hustle us by selling back to us a story we shouldve long ago discarded.