SUGAR (Anna Boden, Ryan Fleck 2009)

[Chris Knipp]

Anna Boden, Ryan Fleck: SUGAR (2009)

Review by Chris Knipp

So near and yet so far

Algenis Perez Soto shines in an understated performance as Miguel "Sugar" Santos, the Dominican pitcher who comes to the US and winds up in the minor leagues. A young man who was a baseball player himself, Soto doesn't have to be able to speak English: part of the story is that he is lost in the language. When he's interviewed for the local radio, his interpreter can't even speak English well. This is a squeaky-clean and earnest version of the raucous, cynical story of rags to riches to rags athletic stardom told in Carlos Cuarón's Rudo y Cursi, a movie that's a lot more fun, but so arch and calculated it doesn't feel real. This one is corny, but it has the ache of truth in its awkward moments, like when Sugar orders "French toast" because he can't explain in English how he wants his eggs cooked. Sugar's story is less dramatic but perhaps more truthful than Carlos Cuarón's. Sugar also is about American baseball, which draws a lot of its foreign players from the Dominican Republic, where this one comes from, while Rudo y Cursi all takes place in Mexico and is about soccer players.

An oddity of Sugar is that it feels outwardly very conventional -- despite its non-Hollywood finale, it adds little to the machinery of a hundred sports movies -- but tells a different and contemporary story, because its focus is on what it's like to be an immigrant Latin American worker in the US who comes and lives at the whim of sports managers. It has a documentary validity (documentaries are often stylistically unimaginative too) and connects with American baseball fans and Hispanics who live in America, and, telling this double story of sports and immigration with a straightforward freshness, it has scored big with American reviewers too.

Sugar's camerawork can be obtrusive, but the film has a fresh, vivid look that suits the newly-minted young athletes in heir brand new uniforms. The naivety of the scene is underlined by the simple Catholicism of the imported players and the pious Protestants who dominate the small-town Iowa world where Sugar becomes a minor-league pitcher.

"Understated" describes Soto's performance, but his role makes him into a good-looking, good-natured stump. He is in one dialogue scene after another where he says nothing, because he doesn't yet understand colloquial English, and he rarely seems to encounter an American capable of crossing the language barrier, who knows enough Spanish, or can simplify his English or talk slowly enough, to have a decent conversation with him. Meanwhile, as Miguel's English still falters but he shines as a pitcher, the film pushes the theme that the Dominican players are only in the US so long as they play well and get along with their coach. There is an undercurrent of washouts, and Boden and Fleck found in researching the story that import players as often went back on their own as because they were forced to. The thematic undercurrent at all times is culture shock -- an alienation that is softened by paychecks that to the impoverished players seem generous and by roaring crowds, local sports page headlines, kids asking for autographs -- but heightened by that nagging ignorance of the language and made devastating when their athletic performance falters. And the Dominicans aren't just Hispanic; they're black, and stand out in small-town Iowa like sore thumbs.

But it's Miguel's foreignness and lack of English that alienate him. In one drawn-out sequence, he walks through a big gaming hall and comes to where a black American player friend is laughing and connecting with a white boy and girl, and he turns around and walks back. This is the player (from Berkeley) who has discovered Miguel has heard of neither Roberto Clemente nor Babe Ruth.

Variety calls this film "exceedingly wholesome," and sometimes it's almost unbearably so, especially if baseball has little magic for you. But Boden and Fleck, who showed close observation of character and milieu in their debut Half Nelson, maintain that standard here, welding together careful research, good casting, and a slowly but surely unfolding story line whose greatest appeal is the way it avoids the feel-good story arc its sports drama format would seem to imply. Too bad they feel obligated to swerve so far in the other direction into feel-bad territory at times that they risk turning Miguel into an object of pity and allowing their sympathy to overflow into condescension -- so that when things lighten up and Miguel is allowed to show a smiley face, we feel jacked around.

[oscar jubis]

Notes on Sugar (2009)

What I love most about Sugar is that most of the scenes do not have a prescribed, singular purpose. The film is written and shot so that there is a great deal of ambiguity and nuance throughout. Writer/directors Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden are primarily concerned with telling the truth as they saw it during research trips to the Dominican Republic, Iowa, Arizona, and Spanish Harlem. Nothing gets bent out of shape to fit into what audiences expect from a drama or from a sports flick.

For instance, Miguel and pals go to a nightclub where he dances with an attractive, local girl. A near-brawl ensues. Maybe racism accounts for it, but maybe not.

A harsh reprimand by the Swing (a minor league team) manager using words Miguel doesn’t understand is followed by a deeply felt, sincere admission that the manager himself has faced similar pressures and disappointments.

Miguel and Ann, the daughter of the couple who are hosting Miguel in Iowa, sit on the porch late one night. Why is it that the soulful Ann pulls away from Miguel during kissing and thereafter? Maybe she’s afraid to develop feelings for someone who is so transient and so well…foreign. Maybe her gazing at him bespeaks curiosity rather than attraction…Maybe her religious principles have something to do with it.

You may conclude that Miguel’s apology by phone to a representative of the Swing for deserting the team and his half-smile during our last views of him in a city park mean he will pitch again for the Swing next season. Or maybe you'll conclude he will stay in NYC because he has found a place in the world where he feels at home.

The last time he calls his girlfriend Sofia, from New York, she doesn’t come to the phone. Miguel is told she is not home. Maybe this is true. But it is possible Sofia does not want to continue a relationship with someone whose financial prospects are now in serious jeopardy after quitting the team.

Miguel tells his friend he left the team because he wasn’t going to wait for them to kick him out but there are other reasons and a series of circumstantial events that potentially played a role in his decision.

Sugar evidences at every turn an awareness of the complex undercurrents of human behavior and motivation. You may leave the theater thinking that the highly accomplished Boden and Fleck opine that American baseball gives young men like Miguel opportunities they would not have otherwise or you may think the film exposes the exploitation of young Hispanics by organized baseball. Sugar is aware that the truth is neither completely one nor the other.

I love movies that don’t see the need to spell things out. I love movies that allow for significant interpretative space. Movies like Sugar are scarce. They are to be treasured.

[Chris Knipp]

Well, I know what you're saying and I said the same thing, but of course simply being indeterminate or ambiguous would hardly be a guarantee of superior quality. I guess you're acknowledging not making a complete case for the merits by calling your comments "notes."

You spoke so highly of the film earlier, I was surprised you hadn't posted about it. So I started this thread partly to give you in particular an opportunity to say more about it. I did'nt see it when it was in theaters, or doubtless I'd have posted a review then.

[oscar jubis]

Indeed, I think I would need a long essay to account for the merits of this magnificent American film. I woke up and read your review while drinking my coffee. I decided I just had to post a few quick impressions. It was easy to come up with these notes since I watched the film three times and I think it is one of the most memorable films of 2009.

I don't know how many proper reviews I will be able to write between now and mid-December when my thesis is due. Besides the thesis, I am writing a review for Film International magazine, and long essays about Kenji Mizoguchi's Sisters of the Gion (1936), Ritwik Ghatak's Ajantrik aka Pathetic Fallacy (1958), and a Jia Zhang-Ke film to be determined. However, I will schedule some time to offer my opinions and notes on contemporary films that interest FilmLeaf members. I would love to write reviews of films I've enjoyed recently like the delightful Ponyo by Hayao Miyazaki, the scabrous Brazilian character study Camila Jam, and Varda's The Beaches of Agnes, but time is limited.