Do
filmviewers need to see another film in which a white man
brings black boys to the Promised Land? Paramount Pictures,
which produces many films focusing on African Americans, evidently
thinks so. Based on a true story, as recounted in Daniel Coyle’s
Hardball: A Season in the Projects, the film Hardball
focuses on Connor O’Neill (played by Keanu Reeves), a
compulsive gambler who has no job, drinks and swears a lot,
and is seriously in debt. When he asks for a loan to pay a
$7,000 debt, his friend Jimmy (played by Mike McGlone), an
executive at an investment firm, promises $500 per week for
him to take over coaching African American Little Leaguers
on Chicago’s South side. The money keeps creditors at
bay, and the coaching enables O’Neill to find a purpose
in life. But the real story is about the lives of the Little
Leaguers, who live in substandard housing projects where drug
wars take place, and whose articulation of English is so muffled
that subtitles are sometimes needed. To avoid casualties in
the battle zone, nobody can go out, look out of their windows,
or even sit at a chair after dark; bullets rule the night.
The baseball activity is the one joy in the lives of all the
teenage children, though O’Neill provides more pep talks
than actual coaching and appears helpless as members of his
team are disqualified or killed because of the battlefield
around them. Although Jimmy initially took up coaching as
a way of giving something back to the community, he presumably
cops out rather than face the reality that he is getting richer
while African Americans in the projects are getting poorer.
Directed by Brian Rob-bins, Hardball seemingly
refers less to the baseball game and more to life in the housing
projects. But in actuality the power elites of Chicago are
the ones who are really playing hardball by leaving the black
ghettoes in Third World conditions while George W. Bush proposes
to cut federal funds that provide security to public housing
residents. MH
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