Photo by Fernando Calzada/Sony Pictures Classics, Fernando Calzada/Sony Pictures Classics
Algenis Perez Soto is a baseball hopeful from the Dominican Republic in "Sugar."
Sports movies have become such formulaic, wish-fulfillment fantasies that a film about a baseball player that isn't utterly familiar seems to exist outside the genre.
Photo by Fernando Calzada/Sony Pictures Classics
Algenis Perez Soto is a baseball hopeful from the Dominican Republic in "Sugar."
"Sugar" follows the story of Miguel Santos, a.k.a. Sugar, a Dominican pitcher from San Pedro De Macorís, struggling to make it to the big leagues ...
Rating: R for language, some sexuality and brief drug use
Length: 114 minutes
Released: April 3, 2009 Limited
Cast: Richard Bull, Michael Gaston, Ellary Porterfield, Karl Bury, Jaime Tirelli
Director: Anna Boden, Ryan Fleck
Writer: Anna Boden, Ryan Fleck
"Sugar" is a sports movie, but the term seems so limiting I hesitate to use it. Fans of such typical triumph-of-the-underdog audience-rousers as "Hoosiers" and "The Rookie" may not find what they want here, just as some sci-fi fanboys may not recognize a weird Sundance time-travel movie like "Primer" as true science fiction, since it lacks special effects.
Heartbreaking yet inspiring, "Sugar" isn't about making dreams come true but about something more commonplace and arguably more heroic: the way a person copes with the disappointment that occurs when a dream dissipates beneath the pressure of reality.
The film is the second feature from the writer-director team of Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, whose previous "Half Nelson," starring Ryan Gosling as a crack-addict schoolteacher, was a similarly intense and distinctive character study of a young man in distress. The lead character this time is baseball hopeful Miguel "Sugar" Santos, played by a handsome and charismatic newcomer, Algenis Perez Soto, who -- like the character he portrays -- hails from the Dominican Republic.
"Sugar" opens in the poor town of Boca Chica in that Caribbean nation, where Sugar is a confident and promising young pitcher -- he's not yet 21, we eventually learn -- in the farm system of a fictional major league team, the Kansas City Knights.
Like his fellow players and their families, Sugar -- who gave up school for baseball -- dreams of making it in "the states." It's cause for much dancing and drinking of Presidente brand beer when Sugar is called up to spring training in Phoenix, and then recruited for Kansas City's Single-A team in Iowa, the Bridgetown Swing, where he's hosted by a baseball-loving old couple with a pretty, wholesome granddaughter (Ellary Porterfield).
The clean, spacious communities of Arizona and Iowa represent extreme culture shock for the Spanish-speaking players, especially the sensitive and somewhat shy Sugar, who surprises an American teammate when he reveals he has never heard of Roberto Clemente or even Babe Ruth.
As the story progresses, Boden and Fleck raise questions about the exploitation of Sugar and the other athletes; viewers may be reminded of the more sinister importation of young black men for profit in centuries past. But such debatable issues aren't addressed directly; they rise out of the storytelling, and the economics of the characters' circumstances.
Increasingly lonely in America (and occasionally desperate -- one subplot involves performance- enhancement drugs), Sugar becomes less of a minor-level sports "celebrity" and more a typical immigrant as time passes. But whether at home in his rural village or lost in New York City, he's a completely convincing character who inhabits what appears to be an utterly authentic world.
"Half Nelson" was a claustrophobic film, with scenes in crummy apartments and bathroom stalls; "Sugar" doesn't ignore the locker rooms or cheap motels associated with the minor leagues, but it's more visually expansive and pictorial. The ballparks and cornfields and Caribbean coastline found in the beautiful location photography suggest promise and freedom even when circumstances seem stifling. "Sugar" is like a Springsteen song -- a work of art about working people torn between heartache and hope.
"Sugar" is exclusively at Malco's Ridgeway Four.
-- John Beifuss: 529-2394
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