Air Balls and Arias

If you like your family fare bland and inoffensive, see The Basket.

If you're one of the five or so people who saw the remake of A Dog of Flanders last summer, you really don't need to see The Basket. It's basically the same thing: Period piece, young boy who's an outcast, learns a skill, teaches people to appreciate art, is accused of setting a barn on fire, but ultimately demonstrates such courage that even the irrationally angry parent of another child that the boy associates with can learn to forgive him. Then again, if you did see A Dog of Flanders, you probably like this sort of thing, so why not check it out again? Wholesome family films are in short supply, after all. You learned to appreciate art history and Peter Paul Rubens last time? Learn to appreciate both opera and basketball this time. Sound like an odd combination? It is, and that's the film's biggest strength: It's probably the only film ever made about basketball and opera appreciation set in a small Washington town during World War I.

In true Saving Private Ryan fashion, the film begins with a pointless opening scene set in the present day, in which an octogenarian receives a present in the mail, an opera CD entitled Der Korb (The Basket), along with a note reading "Remember this?" Eyes brimming with sadness and nostalgia, the old man says aloud "how could I ever forget?," thus segueing into the flashback that is the rest of the movie. This scene is completely gratuitous for two reasons: One, since we never return to the present day, and the significance of the music is later established on its own merits, the scene doesn't set up anything of importance. And two: If the music really is as powerful and heartfelt to the man as the story implies, why did he wait until the age of 80 to get his own copy?

Anyway, the elder man's narration (which lasts through the early establishing scene, then disappears altogether until the end) tells us that his name is Helmut, and he and sister Brigitte were relocated from Germany to the United States during the war. Following a stay in an internment camp, they were adopted by Mr. Simms (Tony Lincoln), the "doctor-pastor-undertaker" of a small town in Washington state that seems to be mostly made up of vast cornfields. Naturally, most of the townspeople are suspicious of the two children, especially Nicholas Emory (Jock MacDonald), a man whose eldest son has returned from the war sans leg. His next eldest son, meanwhile, falls for the lovely Brigitte (Amber Willenborg), possibly because she appears to be the only adolescent girl in the entire village (why the other local boys don't also vie for her hand is a mystery, but perhaps patriotism is capable of trumping teen hormones in wartime).

Young Helmut (Robert Karl Burke) is constantly picked on, befriended only by Emory's youngest son, who is also treated as an outsider due to his epilepsy. Yet Helmut finally begins to come into his own with the arrival of new schoolteacher Martin Conlon (Peter Coyote, affecting a hilarious Mayor Quimby-esque Boston accent). Conlon turns out to have studied P.E. with the man who invented basketball -- he even claims to have been there at the game's very inception, shown in black and white footage as silent movie-style organ music plays -- and as such is quite the player. He rounds the local boys up into a team, and even though Helmut is not included, he takes to shooting free throws on a daily basis, and soon becomes the best in the village at throwing.

Conlon's no simple jock, however: When he's not coaching basketball, he's playing German opera in class (the very one we saw in the opening scene), and translating it a little at a time. This being a pre-TV, preradio (for rural towns, at least) era, the translated story becomes like a soap opera for the villagers, who wait in suspense for the next installment each day. The opera in question is actually a fictitious one, which would explain why the story it tells starts to become an allegory for the events that transpire in the town; it was composed by coscreenwriter Don Caron, and performed by the Hungarian Symphony Orchestra. The rest of the score takes its cues from the opera, to an almost annoying degree: You may find yourself humming the damn thing against your will on the way home.

There's a big climactic basketball game, of course, one that can potentially win the village enough money to buy a combine harvester, and force the local boys and Helmut to cooperate and work as a team. Until that happens, a series of contrived complications will ensue, some of which may be surprising, but since they tend to come out of nowhere only to disappear from whence they came, it's hard to really care. Then again, maybe the lack of suspense is intentional. Wouldn't want to upset the family audience in any way. And while the casting is reasonably effective on the whole, Willenborg is way too distracting, with her horribly false German accent (made worse by the fact that Burke's sounds so authentic) and her Tony Robbins-type giant sparkling teeth.

Is it fair to criticize a "family-friendly" movie for being dull? Or is that a necessary by-product of making a story inoffensive? It's interesting to note that conservative commentators like Dr. Laura Schlessinger are championing The Basket, yet were silent on the subject of, say, The Iron Giant, a family film that was anything but dull (although perhaps the antiwar message of that movie was too much for the far right). For what it is, The Basket is quite adequate: It's not cloying, it has a positive message, and the acting's mostly okay. But it's nothing special, either, and given how blatantly contrived much of the story is, it's sad to see that it took four screenwriters to compose it. Still, if you're a fan of wholesome entertainment, and think Walt Disney has gotten too darn suggestive lately, you might want to go out and support this one, because there aren't many like it made anymore.