Review of Sugar (2010) by Heather M — 08 May 2009

Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck follow up their amazing Half Nelson with a baseball movie that's not really about baseball at all. Sugar, instead, tells the story of the many Latin Americans mined from their home country by Major League Baseball, and the future that awaits most of them.

There is no Big Game climax, no crafty antagonist, no score to settle. Our hero is Miguel "Sugar" Santos, a 20-year-old kid who doesn't really know what he wants, but has always been told (by his mother, his friends, the agent who recruited him as a teen) that he wants to be a professional baseball player. The coda, however, makes clear that the story isn't really just about Sugar, but the hundreds of immigrants like him who are recruited by Americans to entertain them by playing their national pastime, and then are quickly abandoned when they are no longer perceived to be of value.

Fleck and Boden attempt to repeat the success of their debut by avoiding all tropes of the genre. While Half Nelson was laudable for it's sublime subversion of the young-white-teacher-saves-poor-inner-city-minorities-from-certain-doom themes that dominate movies about educators, it was the electric performances by Ryan Gosling and Shareeka Epps that made it truly transcendent. They are smart to avoid all baseball movie cliches in Sugar, but the move seems more calculated here and the film suffers somewhat from it's non-actor cast who give largely vacant performances. Still, it's fun to watch Sugar try to quickly adapt to life in the states. The Iowa family that takes him in are naive and patronizing, but are also shown as truly gentle and loving. It was refreshing to see the denizens of middle-America not being condescended to or portrayed as ignorant rubes.

While Sugar doesn't click on all cylinders, it does so much right that fuels the excitement for the future of the writer-director couple. I can't wait to see what they do next.