Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, the clever young couple behind Half Nelson, find a neat, naturalistic groove with this kitchen sink sports movie. Sugar, a warm, melancholic ode to a fictional baseball star, kicks off in the Dominican Republic, where, having signed with an American professional team (the fictitious Kansas City Knights) as a teenager, our titular hero learns English and pitches at an academy.
Sugar’s big break – a shot at minor league glory in Iowa, and bed and lodging with a couple who seem to have wandered out of a Norman Rockwell painting – is hardly glamorous. It is, nonetheless, more than the young fellow may be capable of dealing with.
Less Field Of Dreams, more Ring Lardner, this unusually direct film is utterly devoid of clichés. Its great triumphs are countered by sadness; its sadness is tempered by pragmatism. Our protagonist, played to perfection by Algenis Pérez Soto, a non-professional actor, is not followed but stalked by a camera, frequently captured from behind as a head and possibly valuable shoulders. It’s docu-drama but not as we know it.
Are Ms. Boden and Mr. Fleck, a hip, married couple from New York, slyly emphasising Sugar’s commodification in a system that snaps up young men, then puts them on a plane back to the Third World? Of course. The touching final baseball game certainly suggests as much. Yet the film is far too bittersweet and intimate to get caught up in global schemes or polemic.
It is, moreover, a fine, nuanced antidote to all the quasi-mythic garbage we’ve had to swallow with regard to this particular American sport. If you build it, they might not necessarily come after all.