REVIEW: ‘Rez Ball’ Is Familiar But Stands Out

On the surface, Netflix Original Rez Ball from director Sydney Freeland is a classic sports movie. The teens of the Chuska Warriors are at the top of their game until tragedy strikes their basketball team yet again. They fall apart, can’t act as a unit, the coach needs to bring an oldtimer out of retirement, and the superstar has struggles at home. You think you’ve seen it a dozen times before. But you’ve never seen Diné kids doing it with a queer coach on a reservation. And that’s what makes Rez Ball special.

The movie falls in that perfect spot where it’s very much for the Indigenous viewers—nearly the whole cast is Indigenous, they speak Navajo regularly, and the countless cultural references and jokes are sure to hit, especially for the viewers who live it themselves. But it’s also clearly accessible to a wide audience. Rez Ball is constantly not only letting you in on the jokes, but explaining why things are happening the way they are, with the incredibly outsized rates of poverty and mortality on reservations. It wants the non-Indigenous audience to feel at ease and uncomfortable because that is what these characters are experiencing.

And the characters are swell. Jimmy Holliday (Kauchani Bratt) takes on the mantle of team captain after the team loses its captain and his best friend. He’s classically difficult to get along with and pushes his teammates away on and off the court. His mom, Gloria (Julia Jones) clearly too young and struggling deeply, tries her best but can’t support him the way he expects her to. So it takes the tough love of coaches and a sweet romance with his Lotaburger co-worker Krista (Zoey Reyes) to help him grow into the leader he needs to be.

Those coaches are both pretty solid. Coach Heather Hobbs (Jessica Matten) dreams of coaching college, but like many of the teams around her, she can’t seem to find her way off the reservation. She’s a tough but fair coach who shows some love here and there but never offers a big emotional payoff scene. That all comes from Gloria, who begins the movie hard to appreciate but goes through her own character arc too, trying to grow and be a better mother for her son.

The actors are actually playing basketball in this movie. It looks so good. So often in sports movies, you get small shots of athleticism and then it cuts away to a hand or foot or even just the ball. But in Rez Ball, we’re really watching basketball, and it’s exciting. There are some really impressive shots, some fun dunks, and lots of nice evasive maneuvers. It’s both good filmmaking and a testament to the importance of basketball to the lives of the real people these characters represent and the real actors representing them.

One strange blunder Rez Ball makes is an offhand comment Gloria makes about Coach Hobbs. In attempting to trash the coach to her son, because they clearly have their own history in high school, Gloria remarks that she used to run around with a lot of guys back in the day… girls too. Lampshading that she went out with other women is unnecessary as far as characterizing Coach Hobbs because, in one of her first scenes, we hear her breakup with her female partner over the phone very casually. So, calling her out this way feels like it’s meant to be described as something scandalous and taboo at best and offensive at worst.

Even if Heather dating women scandalizes Gloria as a character, if it has to be depicted at all (which it doesn’t, it never comes up with Gloria again), surely it didn’t have to be said in such an offensive manner. We don’t need to tear down a person’s queerness just to prove points about other characters. Instead of making the coach out as some kind of deviant for her queerness, Rez Ball could have just let her be a coach who happens to be queer.

On another note, it’s nice that there are no antagonists among the Chuska team. Even when Jimmy is beefing with teammates, it’s never implied that the audience is supposed to dislike them. It’s just a normal part of being competitive teenagers surrounded by tragic circumstances. The only enemies in Rez Ball are the incredibly pompous white kids from their rival Catholic school. In a movie so intent on explaining and demonstrating the highs and lows of the Navajo Nation to non-Indigenous viewers, getting bogged down in villainizing any of the Diné characters or their characteristics would have detracted from that intention.

Rez Ball is well within the established sports movie formula, but its setting and cast of characters make it feel entirely fresh. You can try to predict the arc of the plot, and you’ll probably get close, but unless you’ve lived it yourself, you’ll be hard-pressed to guess exactly what team-building exercises the Warriors will have to do or what tribulations characters will endure on their way towards victory.

Rez Ball is playing now in select theaters and streams exclusively on Netflix September 27th.