HOW SWEET IT IS

After two months of waiting through a sports drought, baseball season is finally starting. With it comes the smell of freshly cut green grass, warmer weather, and the feeling of rebirth that accompanies the game and the changing of the seasons. I recently had the opportunity to screen a movie that played on this theme of rebirth through baseball: Sugar.

Sugar was a 2008 Official Selection of both the Sundance and Toronto Film Festivals. It is the fictional story about Miguel "Sugar" Santos. Miguel is a Dominican league pitcher who gets signed by a fictional major league team and the struggles he faces in the minor league farm system as he chases after his dreams.

The movie opens up on a baseball field where Sugar is pitching in the Dominican League where he is dominating. After the game, we follow Sugar to his home in a small village in the Dominican Republic where we find out that Sugar lost his father at an early age and is the main provider now for his mother, grandmother, younger sister and brother, and helps maintain the two room shack they survive in.

As the movie unfolds, Sugar ends up being signed to a small contract for the Kansas City Monarchs after a grueling tryout session. He is soon on his way to Iowa to join the Class-A affiliate of the Monarchs as a highly touted pitching prospect. He meets his teammates and quickly learns they are also his competition. He realizes, after speaking with older friends on the team, that not many prospects ever make it out of the minor leagues. Thus, the stage of self-discovery is set for Sugar to find out what sacrifice will truly mean if his dreams are to become reality and for him to find happiness.

What many people misunderstand about this movie is that this is not a movie about the process of how major league teams scout foreign players or how they can be treated once they arrive to the states. It is a story about one man's unique struggles; the game of baseball is simply the vehicle for his journey.

What I loved about this movie is that it did not have the typical Hollywood ending-in-a-can that you all too often see with these fictional accounts. It had a sense of realism to see this man struggle, fail, pick himself up, and, in his mind, still succeed and find a semblance of happiness.

Sugar is a well-told story about the maturation of a young man and the pursuit of his dreams which forces him to leave everything he knows behind. It then chronicles his journey as the trials he face change his dream into something he wouldn't have recognized at the start of his travels. It shows how time can change a person's course in life and that in the end, being happy and satisfied with one's self is all the matters.

This movie shows that not everyone who comes from the Dominican Republic ends up as Sammy Sosa or Pedro Martinez. For several scenes in the movie, real people who came from Latin America to chase a dream of playing baseball were introduced and it was revealed towards the end of the movie that many of them ended up doing something else, but they all cherished their memories playing for the minor league affiliates of the Padres, Mariners, Yankees, and many other baseball teams. It was a touching scene that gave credibility to this fictional account and reminds us that even though they may have failed at baseball, they are still people.

The only problem I really had with the movie was that it seemed difficult to follow Sugar's thought patterns at times. The movie had a habit of showing Sugar doing things, but not always showing his reasons until well after he made his decisions and acted out on them. This made it a bit difficult to follow his character development and since the story revolves solely around that, I have to dock points from it.

When all is said and done, Sugar is the compelling coming-of-age story of a young Dominican man as he deals with problems many of us in the United States do not have to worry about (a language barrier, extreme poverty) through the game of baseball and how he finds himself in the end after being lost in this foreign land.

Sugar is out now in New York and L.A. and runs at 1 hour and 54 minutes.

Sugar gets 3.5 out of 5.

-Ray Carsillo