As seen at AFI Fest 2008:
Ryan Fleck
and Anna Boden's baseball drama
Sugar serves as further proof—after 2006's Half
Nelson—of the filmmaking duo's skillful ability to take
old-fashioned premises and turn them into piercing,
unconventional character studies.
Here, Fleck and Boden's subject is Miguel "Sugar" Santos (Algenis
Perez Soto), a young baseball player nicknamed by his teammates
for his sweet tooth. Early on in the film, Miguel and two other
players are recruited from a Dominican Republic training camp to
play minor-league ball for an Iowa-based team. What immediately
follows is a traditional (but totally pleasing) examination of
culture-shock as Miguel moves from the Caribbean to the Midwest,
but Fleck and Boden only use this setup as an easy way to gain
viewers' sympathy for the character before taking a deeper
approach. The audience initially bonds with Miguel in the way
they would a typical underdog athlete, perhaps even more than
they usually would due to the "stranger in a strange
land"-element. It's hard not to develop a love for the guy when
he walks into a distinctly American diner, for instance, and
tries to order eggs, only to discouragingly concede defeat and
ask for his usual French toast when his English isn't good
enough to tell the waitress how he would like them cooked.
(This, of course, is followed by the token pay-off scene in
which she brings him all three types and he eagerly learns how
to pronounce the terms "scrambled," "over easy," and "sunny-side
up.")
But Sugar quickly becomes all but you're average
baseball film, studying a young man who has come to the Land of
Opportunity with little resources beyond baseball, a game that
allows very few potential players prosperous futures. Fleck best
expressed the feeling that dominates Sugar's second-half
in the Q&A following an AFI Fest screening: "It's clear the
movie won't end with Miguel playing his first game at Yankee
Stadium." The story isn't so much a knock on the idea of the
American Dream as it is a realistic look at how many Dominican
boys are brought up with hopes of playing baseball and how few
actually end up Sammy Sosa. Boden and Fleck explore what happens
to those who don't make it to the Majors through their fictional
protagonist, and the results are just as interesting on a human
level as they are as a fact-based look at a sport. Miguel
remains an endearing protagonist throughout—and at a far deeper
level than the film's initial set-up leads us to expect. By the
end of the film, he's become a complex man. (I'll leave it at
that glib statement so as to not give too much away).
Just as critical to the Miguel character’s depth as Boden
and Fleck's assured writing and direction is Algenis Perez
Soto's performance. A non-actor the filmmakers found playing
baseball in the D.R., Soto is a natural, handling the comedic
and dramatic material concerning his character's misadventures
in America just as well as he does the baseball passages. Boden
and Fleck were right to choose him because his work lends a
fresh, unpretentious feel you can't get from someone who has the
expressed intent of studying a character. Sugar never
comes across so naturalistically that it imitates a
documentary—that would defeat the movie's purpose of toying with
the payoff of a traditional premise—but it certainly seems
realistic. In fact, the only time the movie feels forced is when
Fleck and Boden interject with artificial attempts to make the
material more socially relevant. In one scene, a Barack Obama
magnet appears on Miguel's Iowa caretakers' refrigerator—totally
unnecessary, if prophetic—and in another, Spike Lee's Katrina
doc When the Levees Broke plays on the TV in the
background. Sugar would have been better off without
these gratuitous additions, which make it seem like the subject
matter isn’t culturally valuable on its own merits (which it
is). The film is otherwise a heartfelt, sharply focused, and
thought-provoking look at a person who even die-hard baseball
fans may have never even considered.
-Danny Baldwin,
Bucket Reviews
Review Published
on: 12.5.2008
Screened on:
11.7.2008 at the ArcLight Cinemas in Hollywood, CA.
Sugar is rated R and runs 114 minutes.
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