Interview with the creators of *Sugar*

An interview with Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, creators of Sugar, here. Fleck calls the movie "an immigrant story that uses sports as a vessel to explore feelings of loneliness and isolation and the search for community." Fair enough. I liked the movie, which tells the story of a Dominican prospect's journey from a baseball academy in San Pedro to the midwestern funhouse of the American minor leagues; thought it walked the line of verisimilitude without stumbling (too often) into cliche*, and believed in the story enough to enjoy the flight of fancy at the end.

*There's some cliche, from the Dominican kids who keep ordering french toast for breakfast because they don't know how to say "eggs" to a pretty standard take on advancement/demotion stories, but the film struts through its material confidently, and I, for one, was rarely aware that I'd heard much of it before.

Two reasons baseball fans should go see it:

The scenes in the DR, off academy grounds, really put you in the country. A healthy percentage of major league baseball players are Dominican, those of us who consume (and criticize) their product ought to have a sense of where they come from. (There's scene on the malecón, where a waashed-up ballplayer banters with a still-hopeful, that I thought was worth the price of admission.)

The film captures the fear that I imagine common to developing/professional athletes. In the case of the titular character, Sugar, the fear is compounded by his dislocation. Forgetting that, Sugar's success and failure on the mound seem like equal mysteries to him, I don't think he can feel the difference between the mechanics of a good outing or bad. When the stakes are high and the results are public, that must be terrifying, and I thought the film conveyed that.