‘Sugar’ ends up playing in a strange land

"Sugar" is a movie about a Dominican kid trying to make it in the U.S. major leagues, so its title is a bit of a loaded weapon.

Sugar, after all, is a commodity with a history of harsh worker exploitation in that part of the world.

And "Sugar" is the work of Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, whose movie "Half-Nelson" posited that inner-city high school kids could be inspired to learn if teachers made more use of the word "dialectic," part of the No Child Left Awake initiative.

But "Sugar" turns out to be happily manifesto-free, with a reserved, quiet, almost documentary look at a pitching prospect who makes his way from the Dominican Republic to the midwestern United States and ultimately New York City (watch out for the detours).

Most major league teams have a recruiting/training facility in the DR, and a kid nicknamed Sugar (Algenis Perez Soto) starts in one of them - he's a promising right-hander just learning to complement his fastball with a knuckle curve. His live arm gets him a spring training tryout in Arizona, leading to a job on a minor league team in Iowa.

"Sugar" has its own knuckle curve - it takes familiar images of the U.S. and flips them, giving us an idea of how strange our country can look to an outsider.

For instance, when Sugar hooks up with his midwestern minor league team, he bunks with a farm family. The movie gives us classic, heartland iconography of rolling fields and standing armies of corn guarding a quaint farmhouse, but they feel weirdly alien - Sugar is an urban kid, utterly isolated and alone in this rural, English-only setting, and the images reinforce that loneliness.

Sugar's confidence begins to fray, but there are no villains behind his estrangement. Almost everyone around him - his hosts, his coach, the American players, seems eager to help. The cultural gap is just too big.

All of this contributes to a storyline that defies expectations, to the point of feeling anti-climactic, enigmatic. It manages to avoid sports-movie cliches, for example, by simply ceasing to be a sports movie.

Boden and Fleck started the journey of making "Sugar" in New York, talking to Latin immigrants at a pick-up baseball game, asking them how they got there. "Sugar" is one explanation. *

Produced by Paul Mezey, Jam*e Patr*cof, Jeremy K*pp Walker, wr*tten and d*rected by Anne Boden, Ryan Fleck, mus*c by M*chael Brook, d*str*buted by Sony P*ctures Class*cs.