Some Drivel On...Quantum Hoops

“Quantum Hoops” (2007) does not conclude with a blooper reel, a la so many comedy movies, but begins with one instead, or what might as well pass for one, a montage of the Caltech basketball team failing all over the court. After all, at the time Rick Greenwald’s documentary was shot in the mid-aughts, the woebegone Beavers had not won a game since 1985. (They would eventually end the streak at 310 games on February 22, 2011.) That’s failure on a mathematically improbable scale, as “Quantum Hoops” tells us, and perhaps operating with a mathematician’s mind, it explains the logic behind chronicling such long-running failure while giving a pass to the cosmic absurdity. The whole movie assumes the low-key, even nonchalant, air of its narrator, David Duchovny, a 20-year losing streak treated as something like a passing sun shower. I did not need it to drill all the way down to the very essence of the human condition, necessarily, but when one former Caltech hoopster noted that the 1960s passed on campus with nary a peep of the noise from the outside world, I might have liked at least one follow-up question.

Though “Quantum Hoops” nominally chronicles the Beavers’ 2005-06 season, Greenwald eschews embedding with the team, so to speak, by recounting each game, checking in with the players before and after, or even, really, seeming to go into the locker room at all. Given the described workload of basketball and academics and barely having time to sleep, maybe that would have been impossible, but it makes the approach feel impersonal despite so many talking head interviews. Instead, Greenwald opts for broad overview of both Caltech as an institution and of the basketball program. But because there seems to be virtually no footage of the hardwood team’s past glories and agonies, this overview essentially just consists of past players and coaches remembering them aloud, which only goes so far. It also underlines the lack of visual flair overall, utilizing clips that do not really enhance what's being said, only occasionally underscoring the action, mostly just coming across like something to fill the screen.

No, Greenwald is content to let talking heads do most of the walk for him. And they are chipper bunch, granted, from the current and former players to current and former coaches to Gregg Popovich, formerly head coach of Pomona-Pitzer, who lost to Caltech in 1980. He mentions a chill that went through his body when he realized he was going to lose to the sport’s most woeful program, yet even by the end of his interview, the famously acerbic Hall of Famer is waxing inspirational in a way that mirrors the Explosions in the Sky-like music. If the Caltech players feel sorrow, they never really express it, hardly show it, and when one-time coach Gene Victor does allow a brief admission that it was “hard” to lose so much, he fails to expound, probably because he wasn’t even asked to. There is no room for wallowing. In accordance with a university like Caltech, everything is framed as a learning experience.