3.5 of 5 stars
It isn't hard to believe in a professional sport so riddled with cheating and shortcuts" that almost all Major League Baseball teams operate puppy mills in the Dominican Republic.
That's what their ""baseball academies"" amount to" for the most part: puppy mills for young ball-players aspiring to the American major leagues. They're fed decently and sleep in barrack-style bunk-beds under curfew and armed guard. In return" they get a one-in-a-hundred shot against cut-throat competition for a place in the major leagues.
It's this fine line between exploitation and opportunity that Miguel Santos (Algenis Perez Soto) walks in ""Sugar."" Santos"" whose nickname is ""Sugar"" is a young Dominican pitcher who gets called up from one of those baseball academies to the minor leagues in the Iowa corn country. It's the break he's been waiting for to improve his and his family's prospects in his jobless homeland.
Apparently, being a chicken in a pen (as the directors suggest Santos is in his academy) is better than being hungry in the Third World, but both are trumped by living with an embarrassingly un-cosmopolitan host family in lily-white middle America.
Or so Sugar thinks at first. He's a promising pitcher and strong-willed, but with a temper and an unfavorable learning curve. With a good pitch (a knuckle-curve, for the record) and a prayer, he hopes to avoid the fate of so many other Dominican players in America who are deported when their abilities slip and their contracts are not renewed. As this fear begins to materialize, he takes his life into his own hands and leaves Iowa for the only thing more American than baseball: New York City, the immigrant's Eden.
Like it sounds, Sugar"" is a story of Americanization" but it isn't star-spangled. Directors Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck a young couple that tag-teamed on the directing and screenplay make it clear on multiple occasions that the road to American prosperity is paved with the bodies of those who fall by the wayside.
This paradox even extends to baseball. One person tells Sugar that baseball is a game to be enjoyed while another tells him he has to look out for himself and best his brothers to stay alive. Welcome to the American Dream son.
Boden and Fleck do a surprisingly decent job not getting bogged down in the usual cliches of their genre. It's not a sports movie with a sparkling ending or a predictable one but the ending fits like a broken-in glove.
They also thankfully don't overuse the montage that has become so stale in most sports movies. Their style has an urban cultural freshness to it with a dozen colors for every borough in New York.
If the movie bogs down for the long middle section it's because the slow story through Sugar's Iowa excursion doesn't mesh with this cinematic cosmopolitanism. Like a good baseball game it's slow going till the ninth inning. It just might not be the best formula for a movie.
Contact the Diversions Editor at dive@unc.edu.
