Writing/directing team Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck ("Half-Nelson") explore American Major League Baseball's system of bring up players from the Dominican Republic in a sports drama with a message that giving up is sometimes preferable to the demands of the game for its foreign players.
As an unintended companion piece to the superior "Rudo y Cursi," about two step-brothers entering the world of major league soccer, "Sugar" follows its charismatic protagonist Miguel "Sugar" Santos (well played by Algenis Perez Soto), a talented young Dominican pitcher coming up through the ranks from Arizona to a Single-A team in Bridgetown, Iowa.
Sugar lives with local baseball supporters the Higgins, a farm couple with a religiously conflicted teen aged daughter (Ellary Porterfield). Racial tensions of the region combine with Sugar's poor command of English to crush his spirit when an injury keeps him off the field.
The bottom drops out of the story in a disjointed third act wherein Sugar abandons his baseball career in favor of a doomed footloose existence as an illegal immigrant living in the Bronx.
If celebrating failure was the intent of the filmmakers, then they have marginally achieved that limited ambition.
(Sony Pictures Classics) Rated R. 114 mins.
