Sep. 09, 2009 - Issue #725: Sex in the City 2009
DVD Detective
Sugar
Sugar's story of an immigrant baseball player is far from a rags-to-riches cliché
Maybe the simplest way to understand the small but distinguished oeuvre of Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck is to see their films as tweaks on American cinematic clichés, complications on simple stories that define the national ethos. Half-Nelson was, among other things, the very familiar story of an idealistic young teacher reaching out to help an inner-city youth; unfamiliarly, the teacher had his own problems and faults to overcome, and his actions seemed to be as much about finding his own redemption as they were about helping a troubled youth.In that sense, then, Sugar is most readily understood as the sports story strained through reality, the tale of a scrappy underdog who fights against long odds and fails, the 999 999-out-of-a-million shot (something Fleck points out a few times in the special features on the just-released DVD).
Sugar follows its eponymous character, Dominican pitcher Miguel "Sugar" Santos (neophyte Algenis Perez Soto), from his days at an American-run baseball camp to his try-out at spring training to a brief, semi-illustrious stint with a small-town America A-level team to his disillusionment with the game and settling into immigrant life in New York. We see him go from arrogant young would-be star—he promises his girlfriend that, after he gets rich and famous in America, he'll drive a car across the ocean to come back for her, one impossible dream following another—to disillusioned outsider in the space of about a year, a far cry from the usual rags-to-riches arch.
That is, of course, not all there is to Fleck and Boden's talents. Along the way, we'll get subtle commentary on any number of corollary aspects of Sugar's life. Here's an examination of American cultural imperialism, Sugar not just making his living at a baseball camp—the players openly sport the incongruous Kansas City logo, and their English lessons are a mix of baseball terminology and subservient humility—but his family clamouring to watch American Idol. There's a subtle comparison of restrictive and robust religion, Sugar's sincere but more flexible Latino Catholicism—he clutches a cross and prays before every game, but that hardly stops him from attempting to salsa with a corn-fed blonde at the bar afterwards—bumping up uncomfortably with the equally sincere but far more sedate heartland Christianity of his Iowan host family. Here's the isolation of the American immigrant writ large, Sugar's inability to order anything but French toast at a greasy spoon as alienating and depressing as the fans who lambaste after every poor performance, or the opposing player who tells him to go back to Puerto Rico after Sugar beans him.
But then, the most admirable quality of all that is how Fleck and Boden never let the film devolve into some treacly morality tale, nor some purely intellectual exercise, its characters all argument and no flesh. They are spiritual disciples of the Ernest Hemingway maxim that holds if you make things as true as possible, the wider meanings and themes will take care of themselves. Sugar's failed attempt to bed the granddaughter of his host family feeds as much into the immigrant alienation/disparate religion ideas as it does his character's desperate need to connect with somebody, mentally as much as physically. The release of his friend and mentor is as much a commentary on how the baseball machine uses up these third-world workers as it is a punishing blow for a man who feels lost in a strange land without him.
To that end, much can be said at Perez Soto, found at one of the camps Fleck and Boden document (his audition tape, curiously charming, is another of the special features here). So much of the film just silently follows him, and he's never anything less than utterly compelling, fully realized both as a brash and impetuous young man and as a joyful and compassionately sensitive human being. Perhaps his best scene is one that only Spanish-speakers will actually understand, but that his performance allows anyone to understand: he sits on a porch bench, telling the story of how he got his scar to the young girl he'll shortly try to seduce. As he relates his story in his native Spanish, we see the yearning for connection on his face, the casual ease of chatting up a woman wash over him and finally the return of disappointment as the realization that he's still not truly being understood returns. It's a perfect microcosm of what amounts to an utterly stunning film. V
New comments for this entry have been turned off and any existing ones are hidden. We apologize for any inconvenience.
