‘Sweetwater’ Review: An Intriguing But Sketchy Biopic of Nat Clifton, the Harlem Globetrotter Who Broke the Color Barrier of the NBA
Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic “Sweetwater” is a biopic about Nat “Sweetwater” Clifton, the Black power forward who broke the color barrier of the NBA in 1950, three years after Jackie Robinson accomplished the same feat in baseball. It’s telling that Robinson remains one of the most celebrated heroes in sports history, while Clifton is still a somewhat obscure figure. (He was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame in 2014, but still.) There’s a biting irony to that contrast. It relates to how the integration of basketball totally changed the game (the way it was played, the way the fans thought of it), even more than the integration of baseball changed baseball. “Sweetwater,” written and directed by Martin Guigui, is a straight-down-the-middle inspirational sports movie — and, one regrets to say, a kind of benign sketchbook version of the form. Yet it also tells the tale (or, at least, one slice of it) of the Harlem Globetrotters, the fabled team of barnstorming trickster prodigies who Clifton started off as a member of. There were several levels to the Globetrotters’ athletic magic, and the film captures how intricately tied it was to the way that Black players remade the game.