Chances are most sports fans, even many basketball enthusiasts, have never heard of Nat “Sweetwater” Clifton. He is an important person in NBA history as the first African American to sign a deal with the league. The former Harlem Globetrotters star joined the New York Knicks in 1950 and was inducted posthumously into the Naismith Hall of Fame in 2014.
His life story is worthy of a great movie. Unfortunately, Sweetwater is not that film. It’s undone by odd casting, thin characters, and a half-baked script. Some moments are interesting, especially near the end, but those plot lines are quickly abandoned or minimized.
Jackie Robinson broke major league baseball’s color barrier in 1947. Sweetwater aims to highlight the man who was part of the NBA’s integration movement. Technically, Earl Lloyd is the NBA’s Robinson, making his debut on Halloween night in the 1950 season opener for the Washington Capitols. Clifton played four days later. He, Lloyd, and Boston Celtic Chuck Cooper ushered in a new era.
Sweetwater aspires to be an uplifting tale of a man overcoming odds to become a breakthrough sensation in Jim Crow America. Everett Osborne, a former college basketball player at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, does a capable job in the lead role. Casting in basketball movies can be difficult because you need a specific body type. There is only so much you can do with forced perspective camera tricks. The 6-foot-4 Osborne is skilled enough to pull off the 6’8″ Sweetwater.
While Osborne is believable, we cannot say the same for Kevin Pollak and Jeremy Piven. There are mannerisms and speech patterns unique to coaches. There is also a presence. Coaches tend to act as if they have the answers even when they don’t. Pollak and Piven don’t capture any of that. It’s hard to buy Pollak as Abe Saperstein, the founder and coach of the Globetrotters. It’s even harder to buy Piven as Joe Lapchick, coach of the Knicks.
The script doesn’t help. Few of the characters resonate. They are so two-dimensional that connecting with any of them is difficult. Even the lead is underwritten. We know about Sweetwater the basketball player, but we don’t really get to know Sweetwater the person. Writer/director Martin Guigui expects the audience to be satisfied with some flashbacks instead of actual character development.
The lone character who stands out is Cary Elwes’ Ned Irish. He plays the Knicks owner as a practical businessman with a sly sense of humor. He appears to be trying to make an effort in this deflated narrative, as opposed to the underwhelming Piven.
Sweetwater is “inspired by a true story,” which gives it plenty of latitude to build an entertaining story. Instead, there is a lot wrong here. Some storylines don’t go anywhere, including a potential love interest that could have been easily cut. There are physical attacks on Sweetwater and Irish, but we don’t get any follow-up. Instead, we are expected to accept that anonymous racists perpetrated these acts of violence. It’s a real missed opportunity to take a deeper dive into the bigotry of the time.
The most compelling moment of the entire film is the 1980s archival footage of an elderly Sweetwater, who spent the final years of his life as a cab driver in Chicago. You would rather watch more of that and less of Sweetwater.
This was a passion project by Guigui, who tried for several years to get this feature made. He supposedly rewrote the script 60 times. Give him credit for bringing much-needed attention to Sweetwater. You can also fault him for not giving Sweetwater the movie he deserved.
