I know this will sound strange, but here it is: as I left the movie theater after watching "He Got Game" recently, thinking about the fact that once again, I had decidedly mixed feelings about a Spike Lee film, a question occurred to me. What must it be like, I wondered, to date Spike Lee? (Though it strikes me as I write this that I've never heard much about the man's romantic life. Who sits next to him at all those basketball games he attends?) It's not that I had suddenly discovered an irresistible attraction to the man (he's really talented and everything, but I just don't like him that way). Rather, the movie reminded me once again of something that always nags me about Lee's movies. I mean, I know I'm not the first one, or even the hundredth, to point out that the man has ISSUES with women which come through all too clearly in his work. You think I'm exaggerating? Alright--I challenge you to dispute the following statement: Every female character in "He Got Game" is either a relative, a slut, or a back-stabber. The female relatives are one-dimensionally good, while the sluts and the back-stabbers are . . . umm . . . not. There actually is one other type of woman in the film--the whore with a heart of gold. It's a little silly, actually, how precisely Lee fills the cliched female stereotypes of madonna and whore--with the mother in the film fittingly filling the first role, and lots of ladies filling the second (including a professional prostitute, in case you need things real literal).

It's not that Spike Lee can't create (or attempt to create) complex, nuanced characters--witness the two lead male roles in the movie. Denzel Washington plays a man who is in jail for the murder of his wife, and who is willing to try to use his estranged son's talent to gain an early release. But he's also someone who has tried to keep in touch with his children while hes been imprisoned, and who is less concerned with his five-years-without-a-woman libido than with defending and really getting to know the young, misguided prostitute (Milla Jovovich) who lives next door to him with the abusive pimp she loves. (This, by the way, as I'm sure you've read elsewhere in reviews of this movie, is a storyline that goes exactly nowhere). The young ballplayer (NBA player Ray Allen), similarly, is equal parts horny, egotistical, chip-on-his-shoulder guy and responsible, mother-loving, good- head- on- his- shoulders guy.

It's the very fact that Lee does make an attempt to complicate the male characters that makes it so annoying that he has no interest in doing so with the women, who are really only there to reveal the male characters qualities: there is the sainted dead mother whose murder reveals her husband's weakness and whose advice to her son has formed the basis of his strengths, the sweet though impressionable younger sister who allows us to see the ballplayers strong sense of responsibility, the caring aunt whose lack of selfishness towards her nephew throws into relief her husband's greed, the girlfriend who demonstrates basically that girlfriends, particularly the kind of very beautiful girlfriend that male prowess and popularity can buy in Lee's world, cannot be trusted. Added to these is the slew of sluttish white coeds that say more than I wanted to hear about Spike Lee's views of young white women. (There's an underlying theme running through this movie about the morality of black men bedding white women--the young basketball star several times invokes his mother's disapproval of this mixing, before ending up in the sack with two buxom palefaces at once--clearly a sign of his corruption by those who want to profit from his talent, I guess. But that's okay--Dad's prostitute friend is also white. It seems a little weird, given the presence of this issue in the movie, that both the mother and the girlfriend are very light-skinned. I haven't really figured this out yet.)

There is not a woman in this movie who is not ultimately weak in physical, emotional, or moral terms (or some combination of these). The men have weaknesses too, to be sure, but at least they have the power to act on their good or bad impulses. In a sense, the girlfriend who ultimately betrays her ballplayer boyfriend is the most admirable female character in the movie, not because what she does is good, which it certainly isn't, but because she at least acts, because she at least does not collapse into a role of passivity and/or victimization.