I totally get why drunk people watch baseball, but it’s not my
favorite sport. So I look forward to watching a baseball-themed movie
like I look forward to the third Wednesday in April. I mean, I don’t
have anything particularly against it; it’s just not a big event for
me.

But Sugar exceeded my low expectations, and then rose and
developed higher expectations in me, and then mostly met those
expectations, and then it was over, and I felt like I didn’t really
need a personal relationship with a deity, because it was a pretty good
movie, and if that’s all there is to life, well, so be it.

It begins in the Dominican Republic, where a bunch of Dominican
Republicans (I know, the term is “Dominicans,” but there are so few
Republicans left now that I thought I’d help them out by giving them a
Caribbean nation) are playing baseball at a Kansas City Royals
farm-club camp.

Among the best of them is Miguel “Sugar” Santos, so-called because
he’s composed of a glucose molecule and a sucrose molecule linked
together into a disaccharide. It’s weird, but it works. Anyway, he’s a
pitcher with a wicked fastball, skill in carpentry, a hot girlfriend
and a mother who loves him.

Then, baseball calls, and suddenly everyone in his village pretends
to be his best friend, because he’s going to go to America, which is
The Greatest Country In The World. He arrives at the Kansas City spring
training camp in Phoenix, which is a horrible city in the Best State In
The Country. From there, his basic excellence gets him bumped to
single-A ball and a small town in Iowa.

Of course, lots of cultural conflict and such occurs. This is
well-trod territory, and the film uses most of the tropes of movies of
its genre (the little guy trying to make it big, the fish out of water,
and sports films generally). But that’s OK: Pretty much every story has
been told, and no one came up to Sir Thomas Malory when he put out
Le Morte d’Arthur and said, “Dude, that’s totally a rip-off of
Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae,” because
people were cool about that kind of thing back then.

Besides, stories are meant to be retold. What sets Sugar apart is that it’s told so well. As Sugar, Algenis Perez Soto manages
to bring a tremendous amount of tension to his performance. Arriving in
Iowa with only a few words of English (mostly things like “home run!”
and “curveball” and “Alex Rodriguez sold those to me”), he is set up to
live with an elderly couple who speak no Spanish and are noticeably
Caucasian. As he listens to them try to explain household matters, you
can see the incomprehension and fear of making a faux pas play across
his face. And yet he presents a certain naïveté that makes
it seem as though, in spite of being afraid of it, he really is going
to make that faux pas.

Some of the best sequences in the film occur between Sugar and these
new landlords, Helen and Earl Higgins (Ann Whitney and Richard Bull).
They’re super sports fans who have set aside a room in their house for
whatever new player is coming through to play for the local team that
year. Whitney and Bull give well-tuned performances, coming across as
tremendously nice, but dangerously deaf to Sugar’s cultural
differences. The feeling of impending disaster rises when Sugar gets
all lip-locky with their granddaughter, Anne, who runs a Christian teen
group and is probably saving herself for a white guy who speaks English
and has a better ERA. Nonetheless, the meeting-of-cultures stuff is
tremendously sensitive to both perspectives without being treacly or
deferentially P.C.

As the film progresses, and a lot of the standard tropes are
rehearsed (Sugar starts his baseball career with a few bad pitches,
then becomes a local star, then goes into a slump, then a young kid
looks like he’s gunning for Sugar’s slot, etc.), things take an unusual
turn, and the movie departs a little from familiar territory, serving
up an ending that is satisfying, unexpected and not at all simple.

While it could have been a perfectly decent standard-order sports
film, Sugar rises above its roots and produces a tense, engaging
and ultimately fresh perspective on the genre. Writer/director duo Anna
Boden and Ryan Fleck, who previously made the underappreciated gem
Half Nelson, now have two surprisingly excellent small films
under their belts and have become names to watch.

This article appears in May 14-20, 2009.