REVIEW: Sugar (dir. Anna Boden & Ryan Fleck)

Cast: Algenis Perez Soto, Rayniel Rufino, Andre Holland, Ellary Porterfield

Anybody who saw Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck’s stunning feature debut, ‘Half Nelson’, will recall its unflinching and raw exploration of a troubled soul; anybody who didn’t see it… should. ‘Sugar’ is Boden and Fleck’s second feature, and I hope the general consensus will be that they have succeeded where promising feature debutantes so often fail.

‘Sugar’ follows the story of Miguel ‘Sugar’ Santos (Perez Soto), a young Dominican baseball player plucked from poverty to star in the American Minor Baseball League. There are so many genre staples available to the makers of this film – coming-of-age, rags-to-riches, the socio-political divide between the US and Latin America, the inspiring success of a sportsman through determination and passion – but they have resisted these temptations, leaving a rich tapestry of dramatic but insincere stories behind in order to focus on the thankless and barren journey of one young man.

While we do see Sugar in his poor Dominican community, we are never invited to see this poverty in the way Jose Padilha or Fernando Meirelles would have us see it. We see the world through Sugar’s eyes: a loving family, an adoring gaggle of street children, and an unfinished table that will someday decorate the family home. This unswerving concentration on Sugar continues as he is swept away to the bustling metropolis of Kansas City. We might expect to witness racism or bewilderment at the wasteful wealth of the world’s most “developed” nation; but these details are once again left unfocused in the background, resigned to occasional establishing shots and barely audible taunts at a nightclub. The most dramatic conflict for Sugar in Kansas is how to order any food other than “French Toast”. When Sugar is sent to play in the minor leagues for Bridgetown, Iowa, he is forced to live with the stony-faced couple from Grant Wood’s American Gothic. But once again the potential for a gritty, but probably unrealistic, conflict between a religious pastoral community and a young Hispanic sportsman is avoided, and in its place stands an awkward relationship between well-meaning people who will never understand each other.

Much of the film maintains the pace and camaraderie of a generic sport drama, but heartache is always simmering beneath the veneer of this short-lived American dream. When Sugar’s only Dominican friend is unjustly dropped from the league after an injury affects his performance, we see the slow unravelling of Sugar’s confidence and love for the great American past time. As his own performance begins to drop and another pitcher replaces him, Sugar decides not to wait around to be unjustly fired and runs away to New York.

This final section of the film felt, at first, as if it was beginning to drag. But then I realised that this was only because I felt so uncomfortable in this new setting, so entirely divorced from the purposeful narrative of the rest of the film… and that is exactly how we should feel. Sugar wasn’t supposed to end up in New York, he was supposed to succeed and overcome the antagonistic forces of the world to become a symbol of hope for all those suffering indignation and oppression in their lives. By the time he fails, it is too late for us to turn away and pretend we can’t see him. We must sit and watch as he makes himself invisible again: from a hopeful young Dominican child, he now becomes a faceless New York immigrant with a dead-end job and a weekend ball team. But once again this tragic drama is offset by a quirk of realism; it is here, in the urban sprawl of a Hispanic neighbourhood in New York, that Sugar finally finds the romance, acceptance, and friendship he was looking for all along. The film ends with a montage of the other players on his amateur team in New York… all Latin American men with little education and a brief career as American League baseball players before being inexcusably dropped by their team, the sport, and the millions of people who didn’t care where they came from or where they went.