Gary Dretzka
Leonard Klady
David Poland
Doug Pratt
Ray Pride
Patricia Vidal

Sugar
Written & Directed by
Ryan Fleck & Anna Boden

It is, simply, the best sports movie made since Field of Dreams.  Better, it is truly engorged with the indie spirit, the tale of a young Dominican, pursued and massaged by the system, dropped into the foreign land of Iowa to play minor league ball, full of dreams and hopes and arrogance.  This young man is living the best and the worst of the American dream, overstuffed and overly vulnerable, the film bristles with the kind of energy you rarely experience in a movie theater.

And then ... it kicks you in the balls and turns into a completely different movie for no apparent reason.  Fuck the audience ... we're independent!

The frustration of Sugar is profound. 

Fleck and Boden are clearly the most talented writer(s)/director(s) to come out of Sundance in years.  They have remarkable skills for people who have just made a couple of films.  The images are crisp and even when familiar, not simply indie cliches.  And they completely understand how to manage an audience.

But they still have a case of Sundance Fever that they haven't gotten over. 

Mind you, critics get hard for the bait & switch.  If it irritates an audience, it must not only be good, but it must be double meaningful good.  But I say, ";bullshit."  Bullshit, bullshit, 1000 times bullshit.

And it's not - as patronizing smart asses will throw at the wall - a movie that has to have a Hollywood third act to be truly great.  But the first two acts of a great movie need to at least set up the changes in the third act ... there needs to be a consciousness of the ultimate voice of the movie and not just a turn that is politically correctly satisfying to the typically self-congratulating "liberal" audiences of Park City Januaries.
 
There is not much more I can say with a

SPOILER WARNING

SPOILER WARNING

SPOILER WARNING

There really hasn't been a film as beautifully made as Sugar at Sundance in a long while.  Shot with great skill, scored with careful avoidance of cliché (most of the time), acted with perfect natural relaxation ... this should be the undeniable movie of the festival.

Fleck & Boden have approached the rise of a young baseball player who could, in most ways, be your average young minor leaguer (the one American player used as counterbalance is a million dollar baby signee out of Stanford ... one of the few mistakes that is overcome by careful writing and a fine performance), but is not.  He is a Dominican. 

When we first meet Sugar, he is playing at a Dominican baseball mill.  We spend time in his life, with his aspirations, and with the aspirations of those around him ... many of which the film and, I think, Sugar, see as self-serving.  There are winners and losers in the small world in which he is living and the movie does a beautiful job with that.

Eventually, he gets called to America and starts that adventure.  Even in a spoiler section, I don't want to chance anyone being tainted by the details of his time here.  But again, Boden & Fleck really capture the good and bad parts of landing in Iowa from the Dominican Republic with few Spanish speakers while also learning to become professional as a ball player who isn't the obvious standout amongst his now advanced peers.

I am sitting in my seat watching this, my fingers burning to type out the phrase, "Maybe The Best Sports Movie Ever."  The reason it's so good is that it isn't Field of Dreams or The Natural or any kind of sports movie that gets down to the real pain and fear and yes, joy, of moving through the ranks of athletics.   Part of that distance is created by the use of a non-American player, though many of the experiences he has could easily be attributed to an American player, albeit the advantage of speaking the language is significant.  But mostly, it is the remarkable intimacy that Fleck & Boden create in the script, in the situations in which they put Sugar, in the situations they choose not to jump Sugar into (no date rape blow up ... no major injury while being messed with by dumb American drunks ... no visit by a family member that makes it all make or not make sense ... . etc ... ), that make this work so truly exceptional.

And then Sugar gives it all away ... both the character and the movie ... both without any clear reason, though Boden & Fleck are talented enough to make the turn work in its own context ... they just aren't comfortable, it seems, with letting the audience be satisfied with the movie they were enjoying.  For me, the arrogance of "but it's real" is as treacherous and disingenuous on some level than the cheap happy ending that some critics will writing about being thrilled that this movie avoided.

I don't want to write the movie for Fleck & Boden.  They are incredibly talented in all phases and they can write their own films.  But there are dozens of ways that the film could avoid a "happy ending" and still embrace the same thoughtful, realistic, challenging ideas that they had already established in the first two acts without making it into some sideways political statement.

When Sugar gives it all up to, as those who love the third act seem happy to argue, go try to learn to be a carpenter, like his dead father ... not at home, but still in the alien America ... still out of place ... worse, now illegally in the country ... he will not answer the question, "Why?" when people ask.  Nor will the film.  The closest we get is that he was worried that, with two weeks left in the minor league season, he was going to be cut. This comes on the heels of Sugar having his first taste of a setback in baseball.  So, essentially, we have a petulant 20 year old who decides that a slight setback means that he should just give it all up and live in the Bronx. 

Yeah ... it happens.  But dramatically, what purpose does it serve? 

I am willing to take on arguments about why this third act makes sense for the film.  But I have no patience for the arguments - which is pretty much what people come up with - that it's good because it's unexpected or that it's good because it's unconventional or that disliking the choice requires some degree of banality.

For me, this is a rhetorical game that friends and critics often like to play, in which the other person is wrong for some reason other than they just don't like it.  People can rationalize loving movies like Armageddon and hell, for me to tell them endlessly how wrong they are is nothing but vain at some point.  I am not blind to the charms that turn people on.  And I would have to be blind not to understand that many people want to let the tricks a filmmaker uses trick them. 

But this is at the crux of the same argument I make that pisses so many people off when I see a movie becoming a Critics' Wet Dream film, wildly overpraised and willfully allowed its biggest flaws, sometimes even turning the flaws into the assets.  It is just another variation of embracing something that you know is not what it should be, but that feels so good, you can't help yourself.  Sometimes these films are called "guilty pleasures."  Sometimes, they are given Oscar nominations.

But I digress ...

There is no question of how masterful the first two acts of Sugar are ... and they are matched in filmmaking virtuosity in the third.  And that is what really makes me crazy.

This is the kind of film, like Pan's Labyrinth before it, that could be a party to making independent film - that really is independent-minded and really does reach past the studio comfort zone - revered again.  This is the kind of film - a drama, mostly in Spanish, without a drug theme to rev things up - that could end up doing $20 million at the box office and moving an entire generation of film lovers to a willingness to read subtitles the next time they see a well reviewed, but apparently challenging film at the multiplex.  This was never anything like Little Miss Sunshine ... or Half Nelson, for that matter.  It is both great art and a great audience movies ... for two acts.

Do we really think the story of many/any of the men at the end of Sugar, playing ball for fun, finding that joy again, is that they got their shot and walked away from it when the going got tough?  Was Sugar really in some kind of jeopardy in the minor leagues that he escaped by going to the Bronx to make a minimum wage?  Do we really believe it is impossible to be a professional and still love the sport?

If that is the case, then let's hang all the critics at Sundance who have been professionals for more than a few months!  Obviously, we are in the most corrupt industry possible when it comes to journalism.  How can any of us stand it?!?!?!  We must all get out now to preserve our love of film!

Bullllllllll ... shit.

I LOVED the first two acts of Sugar.  I wouldn't have cared if this boy succeeded or failed or chosen another path with a passion.  I'm quite sure that I would have been moved by Boden & Fleck and how they moved along.  But they went to one of the only places they could have to lose me.  They took their considerable skills to the third act of their considerable movie and they turned it into typical, stereotypical (on the highest level) Sundance poli-mush.  They turned it into a movie we have seen one million times before.  They twisted things up into a story that forces its third act supporters - and they are out there - to spin their own feelings because there are contradictions at every freakin' turn. 

And yes, like every film that isn't "Hollywood," you can argue that it's "real."  But Fleck & Boden aren't about real ... they are filmmakers who work in fairly broad metaphors and then make them feel real. 

Now, when they can get past wanting to wipe that smug smile off the audience's face ...

- David Poland