The film tracks about a year in the life of a professional baseball prospect (nicknamed “Sugar,” and played by Algenis Perez Soto, a non-professional actor plucked from the ballfields of his native Dominican Republic), and as a baseball fan and player myself, I was really eager to check this film out. But “Sugar” is much more than a baseball movie: it is an immigrant tale, a coming-of-age story, and an examination of to what extent we all have the courage to truly follow our dreams.
As a young prospect, Sugar faces incredibly long odds of actually making the major leagues. But the game is not the hard part–leave that to Hollywood sports melodramas. Acclimating to life away from home is the real challenge, sent off as he is to the strange foreign land of Bridgetown “Eye-A,” as Sugar pronounces ‘IA’ (Iowa) in the first indication of the daunting (and often humorous) language barrier facing Sugar.
In the end, Sugar can’t take the pressure. He leaves the team and heads to the Bronx, looking for low-pressure work as a dishwasher and a carpenter. Will he give professional baseball another try eventually? Will he regret not playing out the string? Perhaps. The stakes in this film are not artificially high–it’s not the World Series he’s missing; when he flees to New York, he’s not facing life or death drama. The brilliance of the film is the simple and thereby universal struggle that is rendered in intimate detail. Sugar’s debatable cowardice is an act that hit me at the core of my own self-confidence: do I have the courage to give myself completely to my dream? Would it be okay if I didn’t? “Sugar” is an emotionally complex and astonishingly touching portrait of a young man playing out these same questions.