Sugar (4 Stars)

Movie Review by Michael Phillips

 

I can't imagine a baseball fan -- or a moviegoer -- who wouldn't respond on some level to the new film "Sugar," a rich and moving reminder of the way professional sports aspirations can shape someone's destiny in the real world, as opposed to the mythological realm of "The Natural."

Now, you may love "The Natural" the way I love "Bull Durham." But "Sugar" is something else.

In America we tend to like our baseball stories the way we like our immigration stories: triumphant, reassuringly lucky.

A little adversity, a lot of will, a mound of happiness. "Sugar" has all that -- it's a very full emotional experience -- but not in the expected order.

It follows a 19-year-old from the Dominican Republic, making his way to Arizona and then Iowa, in the employ of the (fictional) Kansas City Knights farm system. What happens to this kid, Miguel "Azucar" ("Sugar") Santos, feels like the stuff of life.

Writer-directors Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck respect their protagonist, and the long odds these athletes have against them, too much to squeeze him into a storytelling formula.

When we meet Sugar, played by the wonderful screen newcomer Algenis Perez Soto, he's already a hero to his village. (In 2008, Dominicans accounted for 11 percent of all Major League Baseball players.) Since 16 he has trained with the nearby Boca Chica baseball academy, where his pitching has attracted some attention. An American coach teaches him the fine points of the knuckle-curve. Suddenly he's more than promising, and the new house he has been trying to build for his family must wait until he returns from America.

"Sugar" reminds us, constantly, of the percentages these players face.

In Phoenix, at spring-training camp, life is a series of cultural dislocations, minor and major injuries, a little comic relief. Sugar and his fellow minor-league hopefuls hang out at a diner where they order French toast, because they haven't learned the English for anything else on the menu. (In Arizona? They don't have anything in Spanish?)

From there Sugar makes the jump to Bridgeport, Iowa, and a Single-A team, the Swing.

 

Arizona was one thing; this rolling green landscape is something else. Richard Bull and Ann Whitney, play the pitcher's host couple, Christian folk who love their baseball, and whose granddaughter (Ellary Porterfield) becomes a symbol of American sunshine and promise for Sugar.

And then, he starts having trouble with his game.

At this point the film takes a turn I won't discuss. Suffice to say, if a major studio and another $20 million were involved in the making of "Sugar," it would've worked out very differently. Boden and Fleck's previous film, "Half Nelson," in which Ryan Gosling played a teacher with a crack cocaine habit, marked these two as portrait artists with an eye for the telling, off-center detail.

"Sugar" is no less vivid in its portraiture.

The direction their story goes may not be the direction a focus group would've selected, but it's powerful and honest. At the very end, the filmmakers allow a series of voices -- men whose stories are probably no less compelling than Sugar's -- to speak directly to the camera.

This is our country, the film says, simply and well.

And this one slice of the American experience amounts to one of the best films of the year.

 

 

Sugar

MPAA rating: R (for language, some sexuality and brief drug use).

Running time: 1:54.

Starring: Algenis Perez Soto (Miguel); Rayniel Rufino (Jorge); Andre Holland (Brad); Ann Whitney (Helen); Richard Bull (Earl); Ellary Porterfield (Anne); Jose Rijo (Alvarez).

Written and directed by Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck; produced by Paul Mezey, Jamie Patricof and Jeremy Kipp Walker. A Sony Pictures Classics release.

 

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