Review: Sugar

Having greatly enjoyed Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck's debut Half Nelson, I was greatly looking forward to their second film Sugar. The film certainly starts well as young Dominican Miguel journeys to Kansas to play baseball. The first two thirds of the film play out like a traditional sports film with Miguel shown as a great pitcher in the Domincan Republic but struggling when he gets to the U.S. We are also presented with a fish-out-of-water type story where Miguel struggles to cope with his new host family an elderly baseball-obsessed redneck couple. I found it was the final third of the story where Fleck and Boden struggled to finish as Miguel leaves Kansas for New York after being frustrated with his playing.

Although I enjoyed the performances from the unkown cast of mainly Hispanic actors, it was the whole structure of the thing and Miguel's journey that troubled me. He was meant to be someone who loved and trained to be a baseball player but then found he was more at home playing baseball for fun and making tables. The love story between Miguel and his host families uber-religious granddaughter seems a little tagged on and although the message seems to be 'do what you love but don't let it take over you' it still seemed that there was something lacking in Sugar which was present in the great Half Nelson.