The sugar story movie5/17/2023 The game of baseball, ungoverned by the clock, is notoriously full of surprises, and the surprise of “Sugar” I don’t mean the major third-act plot twist, which is astonishing when it happens and utterly logical in retrospect is that it’s not really about baseball at all. (Here in America we may accept the constitutional separation of church and state, but church and sex are much harder to keep apart.) On the field Miguel hits his stride early, is slowed down by an injury, faces various temptations and then. Off the field he socializes with his fellow Spanish-speaking ballplayers, befriends a former college star and conducts a tentative flirtation with the strawberry-blond, churchgoing granddaughter of his hosts, who wants him for spiritual or carnal purposes, or both. After a stint in spring training in Arizona, Miguel finds himself in Iowa, boarding with an elderly local couple and trying out his stuff in front of some pretty demanding hometown crowds as a starting pitcher for the Bridgetown Swing. Something similar happens in “Sugar.” For more than half its running time the film seems to be following the narrative structure of a standard sports story, unfolding through the triumphs and reversals of a single, fateful season. But by making the teacher in question (played by Ryan Gosling) not only a drug addict but also, more important, a complicated individual whose moral confusion was hard to separate from his political idealism, they upended easy, sentimental assumptions about race, class and urban life. Fleck, a married couple who live in Brooklyn, seemed at first to be working within a familiar, somewhat dubious genre, the heroic urban teacher melodrama. In their previous feature, “Half Nelson,” Ms. ![]() On weekends, Miguel goes home to his village to visit with his family and his girlfriend, and to hang out with slightly older men whose own dreams of major-league glory have evaporated or expired. An armed guard stands at the gate, and practices are observed from what looks like a guard tower. Sugar and his fellow recruits live in a training center that in some ways resembles a prep school, in others a prison. Like many young Dominican men who demonstrate some baseball talent, he was signed by an American professional team (the fictitious Kansas City Knights) as a teenager. Nicknamed Azúcar (Spanish for sugar), and played by a marvelously expressive and likable young nonprofessional actor named Algenis Pérez Soto, he is sweet and easygoing, but also fiercely competitive and a bit cocky. Miguel Santos is certainly capable of such delight. Though it tells a fictional story, “Sugar” belongs on a shelf with “Hoop Dreams,” another great film that challenges us to shed our illusions about sports even as we retain our capacity to delight in the games themselves. Fleck to turn a quietly critical eye on its economic workings and social consequences. It is their belief in the dignity of the sport that allows Ms. The small details and rituals of the game the locker room banter, the on-field surges of intensity and the tedium of the dugout are captured with subtlety and without egg-headed, glorious-pastime sententiousness. “Sugar,” which follows a young pitcher from a training camp in the Dominican Republic to a minor-league club in Iowa (and beyond), is infused with a deep affection for baseball, the rhythms of which are nimbly captured by a narrative pace and editing style that quicken and relax as necessary. It is also, at least implicitly, a central concern in “Sugar,” a wise and lovely new film by Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck. ![]() This basic contradiction will be in vivid evidence this weekend, during the national college basketball championships. But the practice of big-time sports is often cruel and corrupt, a business built on the exploitation of young people and the peddling of impossible dreams. There is something undeniably noble and beautiful about the love of sports: the appreciation of grace and excellence for their own sakes, the pleasure of competition, the discipline of training.
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