‘Sweetwater’ Review – Strong Visuals Can’t Redeem A Bunch Of Empty Buckets

Director Martin Guigui, best known for his deathly Dennis Quaid led drama Beneath the Darkness (2011), has teamed up with Sunset Pictures to release the next biopic in a long line of hits and misses that the genre has seen in the last decade. Sweetwater follows the early days of the worldwide basketball phenomenon Harlem Globetrotters as they travel across the country, tracing the historic rise of their brightest star, Nathaniel “Sweetwater” Clifton. Unfortunately, this film is dim in comparison.

At its best, Sweetwater is a steady slow-burn that reflects the best parts of basketball and heart-to-heart humanity. The early scenes on the court with the original Harlem Globetrotters are consistently fun and, well, sweet. They get repetitive as the film goes on, but those sequences represent the most compelling aspects of the experience. An experience that, on the whole, is unfortunately shallow.

This hurts especially when considering the inherently important subject matter at hand here. This is the real life story of the National Basketball Association’s (NBA) first contracted African-American player. Clifton signed with the New York Knickerbockers in 1950, and his story deserved a lot better. At the very least, regarding Clifton’s character, newcomer Everett Osborne gives a truly earnest, thoughtful performance. He does his part and more. But he’s written like a subject in this movie rather than an actual character.

People talk about him a lot, you hear his name constantly. When he’s on screen though, he hardly ever gets an opportunity to shine. Aside from the expected big game at the height of the third act, he never really does more than what people tell him to. There is a compelling subplot where he meets a girl at a club, but we don’t spend enough time on that, either. He takes the backseat in a movie that has his name in the title.

To the film’s credit though, it looks very good. The overall look lends itself to the time frame; rich, faded frames of old dusty courts and teams wearing home-knit jerseys help to elevate those aforementioned basketball sequences. There isn’t anything flashy as far as the camera work goes but the subtle, relaxed nature of it all is nice. The lighting is absolutely superb, too. There is one specific sequence at the bottom of a stairwell that is relatively uneventful in nature, but the way that it is shot and lit is genuinely clever and elevates it dramatically. Sweetwater earns credit in this regard.

In essentially all other facets, the film struggles. Aside from Osborne, the performances are mostly unmoving and stilted. The film is set in the 1940’s, but with shaky accents and unconvincing deliveries, nobody really feels like they belong there. The cigar-puffing, money-throwing tendencies of Cary Elwes, who plays Ned Irish, are occasionally enjoyable, but even he struggles to hit the right beats when it matters.

That issue is deeper than the performers, so you don’t want to simply fault them. Something could be said about direction, but it’s clear that the cardinal cause for the above problem, and really the majority of this film’s problems, is the script. It’s both overstuffed and underdeveloped, trying to squeeze in an array of details that it doesn’t take the time to actually flesh out. For example, about halfway through the film it’s randomly mentioned that Clifton served in the military. This is knowledge that all our main characters supposedly had, and it was used in the moment as a sort of “gotcha” for Clifton’s detractors. Yet it wasn’t even hinted at before that, nor was it ever mentioned again. There are multiple instances where the film does this, and it leads to the entire thing feeling wildly uneven.

The film could’ve used an extra 15-30 minutes or so to remedy that, but the unevenness leads to a poor pace already without the extra time. Still, this story seems to have a lot more to offer than what made it into this film. That goes back to it not really playing like Clifton’s story, though it absolutely is, and should have been written that way. Again, this isn’t to say that the film disrespects his journey or anything, it’s just a very unfocused, underwritten retelling.

Sweetwater feels like a mix between a self-serious, careful biopic and a parody of one. The filmmakers never commit to any one direction, leaving a bunch of loose ends dangling out of reach in the dark, shadowy peaks of Madison Square Garden. It isn’t a total loss, but it is a total missed opportunity. Let’s hope we don’t have to wait long for the story of Nat Clifton to be given a proper redo on the silver screen, because above all else, his story is worth being told.

Sweetwater will debut in theaters on April 14, 2023 courtesy of Briarcliff Entertainment. 

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2JmyjKCKWYc]