What the movie knows is how the game is played in the tough urban circles where these guys operate. The director, Ron Shelton, who also wrote the screenplay, knows how his characters talk and sound, and how they get into each other's minds with nonstop taunting and boasting. The language is one of the great joys of this film, not just because of its energy and spirit (most of the characters are gifted verbal improvisers) but because of its originality. The usual four-letter words and their derivatives are upstaged by some of the most creative and bizarre insults I have ever heard in a movie.
It's interesting that this is not simply a basketball movie.
Shelton, whose first film as a director was the great baseball comedy “Bull Durham” (1988), knows all about sports that are played by adults for adult reasons; about how the appearance of boys at play can obscure the reality of men at work. And in “White Men Can't Jump,” he has given both Harrelson and Snipes women who want their men to be more responsible than they know how to be.
Harrelson's Puerto Rican girlfriend is played by Rosie Perez, who all but steals the movie with one of the funniest performances since Susan Sarandon's in “Bull Durham.” You may remember Perez from “Do the Right Thing,” where she played the Spike Lee character's girlfriend, but here she unleashes an entirely new side to her character, as a brassy Brooklynite who spends her days laying down the law to Harrelson and studying the almanac. She dreams of being a contestant on “Jeopardy,” and when she gets her chance, her appearance works in terms of the movie - it's funny, but it's not a stunt. This is Oscar-caliber supporting work.
The Perez and Harrelson characters have an enthusiastic physical relationship, which is treated with refreshing directness.
There are no “sex scenes” as we have come to expect them, but instead an easy, friendly warmth that is expressed, in her case, through comfort with nudity. Often in the movies you have the sensation that actors in love scenes have rehearsed to the point of choreography, so that every shot can be calculated down to the most subtle teasing backlit nuance. Here Perez and Harrelson create characters who know each other and enjoy one another.
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