Movie Review: The Other Dream Team
I was too young to really care about the 1988 Olympics, but I remember the 1992 Olympics vividly. The Dream Team was always top of mind for me, but the Lithuanian team was a close second. While I was young and naive at the time, I at least understood the historical significance of the 1992 Olympics.
The Other Dream Team, which uses the 1992 Olympic Basketball Team’s story to also showcase the struggle for Lithuanian’s independence under Communist Russia, is a captivating and important story for people to know. Director Marius Markevicius does a good job telling the story, but at times it felt more like a documentary you might see on ESPN instead of a cinematic documentary. While this didn’t affect my enjoyment of the source material, The Other Dream Team suffers from safe story telling and choppy editing.
The main story of the documentary is definitely the struggles of the players and how their country transformed along the way. I loved watching Sabonis and Marciulionis play in the NBA growing up and I had absolutely no idea the struggles and hardships they had to go through just to play the game they love. Basketball is painted as a unifying agent for the country – something they can all hold on to – so much so that as you watch their story unfold, you start to root for them (even though you know the country has been free of Soviet rule for over 20 years now). The historical significance of these players and what happened in Lithuania are amplified throughout the documentary through interviews with NBA greats and prominent members of the Lithuanian government and basketball organizations.
We seem to take everything we have in the US for granted, but documentaries like The Other Dream Team really help ground you. There was one sequence for instance when Marciulionis goes to the Golden State Warriors and he’s shocked that he’s allowed to by a car and that the food at the grocery store isn’t being rationed. The documentary is filled with moments like this. At one point, the Lithuanian players (when they were being forced to play as Soviets) had to resort to smuggling goods into the country to sell to provide for their families since they were only getting paid about $100 a month.
I thought the documentary should have ended with the Bronze medal presentation, where the Lithuanian team wore Grateful Dead clothing to receive their medals. Instead, Markevicius uses the plight of Lithuania’s Dream Team to show how they’ve paved the way for future athletes by splicing little vignettes of Toronto Raptor rookie Jonas Valanciunas and his path to the NBA. Unfortunately, I think the focus put on him throughout the documentary takes away from the focus of the 1992 Lithuanian Team and Lithuania’s trials and tribulations prior to their independence. Overall though, The Other Dream Team is a very good documentary that tells a story that historians and sports fans alike should know about.
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