On the movie 'Sugar'

We here at America's Fish have grown wary of baseball movies. Bull Durham still makes us pause when we pass it while changing channels, but an encouraging slate of baseball movies in the late '80s that included Bull Durham, Major League and Field of Dreams has devolved into a series of mostly forgettable attempts to find new ground in an old genre. Keanu Reeves somehow managed to turn the book Hardball, a gritty account of Little League baseball in inner-city Chicago, into a feel-good movie. Even Kevin Costner who created two of the created characters in the genre, sullied it with For Love of the Game.

Which brings us to Sugar. Everything that has been wrong with baseball movies -- even the good ones -- is right in this movie. It's not about baseball or baseball players, exactly, but about the people who play baseball. Maybe that seems like the same thing but it isn't. A movie like Major League is about baseball players and brings with it all the cliches inherent in the genre. Although it manages to turn a few of those on their head -- the game-winning bunt from a weak-kneed catcher being much preferable to the exploding stadium lights of The Natural -- the movie never transcends its setting.

Sugar on the other hand, is about a boy -- Miguel "Sugar" Santos -- who happens to play baseball. Most of the movie is set on or around a baseball diamond of some sort, starting with the practice fields of a Dominican baseball academy owned by the fictional Kansas City Knights and ending in the Bronx's Roberto Clemente Park. But the film is never trapped by its setting or its genre. The credit goes to Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden, the filmmakers also behind Half Nelson. Like in that movie, Sugar's story occasionally strays into what seems familiar territory only to take abrupt and surprising turns. What could have been an overwrought rivalry between a college-educated bonus baby and the player who barely speaks English is brushed aside in favor of richer dramatic territory. A scene that could have devolved into a miniature race war at an Iowa dance club ends abruptly. Rather than underscoring a clash of cultures, the brief moment is used the emphasize Sugar's sense of isolation in a place heretofore used to idealize baseball: Iowa.

That said, this is a baseball movie in the truest sense. Like other great baseball movies few have seen -- Pastime, Long Gone and, to a lesser extent because of its improbable ending, Talent for the Game -- Sugar finds an aspect of the game few understand or possibly even know about, in this case the development of players in baseball academies owned by Major League Baseball teams in the Dominican Republic, a country where a disproportionate number of childhood dreams involve playing baseball in the United States. This is the story of what happens to those who either don't make it all the way or decide along the way that the dream belongs to someone else. But the movie never tries to be more than what it is: the story of a boy named Sugar.

And finally our hope for the baseball movie has been restored. Now, if someone would just make a movie out of the great baseball book Prophet of the Sandlots, the tragic story of the scout who discovered Mike Schmidt.