High Fly­ing Bird

Despite its ver­tig­i­nous title, Steven Soderbergh’s first fea­ture of 2019 pri­mar­i­ly con­cerns the fetid under­bel­ly of an Amer­i­can insti­tu­tion and, to a cer­tain extent, soci­ety as a whole. While the hoop dreams of ghet­toised African-Amer­i­can males have long made for rich and com­pelling nar­ra­tive dra­ma, High Fly­ing Bird tack­les this sub­ject side-on, offer­ing a glimpse into the murki­er, trans­ac­tion­al side of pro­fes­sion­al basketball.

The film has been favourably com­pared to Ben­nett Miller’s Mon­ey­ball – which Soder­bergh him­self intend­ed to direct back in 2009 before cre­ative dif­fer­ences set him on a dif­fer­ent path – though it is more overt­ly polit­i­cal and spir­i­tu­al than that. Quite uncon­ven­tion­al­ly, this is a sports movie in which a ball is hard­ly bounced, the action tak­ing place almost entire­ly out of pub­lic view and, Kyle MacLachlan’s sauna ambush aside, with­out a drop of sweat in sight.

Ray Burke (André Hol­land, a rev­e­la­tion in Soderbergh’s The Knick and again here) is an artic­u­late and savvy New York sports agent caught in the mid­dle of a ​“lock­out” which has brought the NBA sea­son to a stand­still. This not only tests Burke’s rela­tion­ship with assis­tant Sam (Zazie Beetz) and VIP client Erick (Melvin Gregg) but also threat­ens his liveli­hood and every­thing he has worked for. Over the course of 72 hours we watch him attempt to break the impasse while sly­ly tip­ping the scales in his favour.

As Burke sets about manip­u­lat­ing and out­ma­noeu­vring rival agents, NBA reps and even his own boss (Zachary Quin­to), we get a sense of his inti­mate knowl­edge of the busi­ness of bas­ket­ball as well as his pas­sion for the game and those who play it. In pri­vate con­ver­sa­tions with Scott, he talks about want­i­ng to give ath­letes more agency and encour­ages the promis­ing rook­ie to stop think­ing small and start dream­ing big. More point­ed­ly, while shoot­ing bas­kets and the breeze with his men­tor, a vet­er­an youth coach named Spence (Bill Duke in his most reward­ing role in years), Burke rails against the ram­pant exploita­tion and com­modi­ti­sa­tion of black bodies.

Both men lament the con­trol white admin­is­tra­tors and net­work exec­u­tives exert over the league’s most valu­able assets (“They invent­ed a game on top of a game,” as Spence elo­quent­ly puts it). But what are they to do about it? Burke’s answer is an inge­nious one. As some­one who under­stands the val­ue of image own­er­ship in the infor­ma­tion era, he hatch­es a scheme to under­mine the NBA by pre­sent­ing a thor­ough­ly mod­ern alter­nate to its exist­ing prod­uct. Giv­en Soderbergh’s DIY ethos and rep­u­ta­tion as some­thing of a mav­er­ick, the auda­cious, anar­chic man­ner in which Burke exe­cutes his game-win­ning play feels dou­bly significant.

The irony, of course, is that Burke too prof­its off these young men, lever­ag­ing their tal­ent, ambi­tion and inex­pe­ri­ence for his own finan­cial gain (to that end, Jeryl Prescott’s mother/​agent would per­haps have made for an even more fas­ci­nat­ing pro­tag­o­nist). Cru­cial­ly, how­ev­er, Soder­bergh and screen­writer Tarell Alvin McCraney, who pre­vi­ous­ly wrote the script for Bar­ry Jenk­ins’ Moon­light, show Burke to be a man of moral and eth­i­cal integri­ty who is sim­ply tak­ing advan­tage of an unfor­tu­nate situation.

High Fly­ing Bird was filmed on an iPhone 8 fit­ted with an anamor­phic lens, Soder­bergh once again act­ing as his own DoP under the alias Peter Andrews. Where he utilised a sim­i­lar tech­nique to dis­ori­ent­ing, con­spic­u­ous­ly lo-fi effect in 2018’s Unsane, here flu­id, tri­pod-mount­ed long takes estab­lish a sleek­er look and rhythm. As Burke dash­es between high-rise office blocks and restau­rants to con­duct his sur­rep­ti­tious deal­ings, Soderbergh’s rov­ing, wide-angle cam­era empha­sis­es the impos­ing struc­tures which dom­i­nate this cor­po­rate envi­ron­ment, while also under­lin­ing the metaphor­i­cal heights Burke – and by exten­sion all black men – must scale in order to achieve par­i­ty, let alone greater influ­ence and auton­o­my, in white America.

McCraney deserves huge cred­it for eschew­ing cheap sen­ti­men­tal­i­ty and hard-worn cyn­i­cism, which might have ren­dered this tale of greed, faith and pow­er as mere­ly Mon­ey­ball-lite. But it is the rad­i­cal meth­ods and per­spec­tive Soder­bergh employs that make this feel like an urgent and inci­sive exam­i­na­tion of the inter­sec­tion between race, sport and mon­ey in Amer­i­ca today. The rev­o­lu­tion may not be tele­vised, but you can bet it’ll be shot on a smartphone.