SWEETWATER (2023) - Mark Reviews Movies

Sweetwater, Briarcliff Entertainment

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Review by Mark Dujsik | April 13, 2023

Here's a very strange biography that leaves us wondering if the subject's story was actually worth telling in the first place. It clearly is worth learning about the life, career, and accomplishments of Nat "Sweetwater" Clifton, one of the first players to break through the color barrier within professional basketball, but writer/director Martin Guigui's Sweetwater doesn't appear willing or to know how to communicate that story with any sense of real significance.

Instead, we get a sort of by-the-numbers story about an underdog overcoming various challenges with help from a lot of good-hearted, well-meaning people in power. There are times that Sweetwater, as the character insists everyone calls him, almost seems more akin to a prop in this story than the entire reason the story should be told. It does this dramatization and the real man a great disservice to so frequently make him a supporting player in his own biography.

His story begins in 1990, well after the basketball career of Sweetwater, played by Everett Osborne, is finished, and a sports reporter (a brief cameo by Jim Caviezel) is on his way to the airport in Chicago in a cab. The driver knows a lot about basketball and the rise of the way it's currently played, because he was a pioneer.

The movie quickly returns to this framing device at the end, of course. It's exceedingly odd that neither the dialogue nor the text coda at the end explains how our main character went from playing professional sports to driving a taxi—or whatever implications that shift might mean about how the league and society treated someone as vital to the game and social change as the movie insists that he was.

Most of the story is set between 1949 and 1950, with Sweetwater initially playing for the Harlem Globetrotters, seen little more as a novelty act for tricks and showboating. He's one of the team's star players, though, catching the eye of New York Knickerbockers coach Joe Lapchick (Jeremy Piven) when the Globetrotters defeat the reigning NBA champion from Minnesota at Madison Square Garden.

Joe is determined to sign Sweetwater to his team, but Knicks owner Ned Irish (Cary Elwes) sat in on a meeting of team owners, where they voted upon a "gentlemen's" agreement that no professional team would draft or otherwise sign any Black players. The setup of Guigui's screenplay is unfortunately focused more on the basic decency, good-natured heroism, and smart business sense of men like Joe, Ned, league president Maurice Podoloff (Richard Dreyfuss), and other not-or-less-racist owners than anything Sweetwater does, says, or experiences.

That leaves Sweetwater to play games, butt heads with Globetrotters coach/owner Abe Saperstein (Kevin Pollak) over how much he and his teammates receive each game, have an encounter or two with ugly racists (Eric Roberts has a glorified cameo as one), and mainly wait for Joe and Ned to come to some agreement about how to navigate or break league policy. Watching Osborne, whose performance is a bit too reserved to make much of an impact (although much of that has to do with the underwritten character), and other actors replicate the fun and skill of a Globetrotter game/performance is entertaining. Despite the weaknesses of his script, Guigui does also stage and shoot the on-court action of those scenes, as well as a single climactic professional match, with some verve.

With so little about Sweetwater's life (A couple of flashbacks, one to his childhood and the other to his high school days, do little more than show the influence of other people who aren't him) and career (That one NBA game is the only thing about that here), the movie almost seems to go out of its way to downplay and/or undermine its own subject's importance. The screenplay acknowledges that Sweetwater isn't the first Black player to participate in an NBA game, but that's seen more as an irritation to Ned and Joe, who wanted their team and player to be that piece of history. That Sweetwater could and should have been the first is treated as a bit of trivia, but as for what the actual breakthrough and his overshadowing means to Sweetwater, those don't seem to matter to this movie.

That's because Sweetwater primarily sees its eponymous character as a symbol. The approach might have worked if the movie determined some actual purpose to exploring the man and his legacy, but without that, he's kept on the sidelines of his own story.

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