Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck (2008)

The two writer-directors had a well-deserved success with Half Nelson in 2006.  (On that occasion Ryan Fleck had a single credit for direction; Anna Boden and he shared the writing credit.)   They certainly can’t be accused of trying for a repeat by offering more of the same but the diametrically different Sugar is disappointing.  The main character in Half Nelson, played by Ryan Gosling, was clever and superficially charming but Fleck and Boden set themselves an interesting challenge in trying to engage our sympathies with a protagonist who seemed to have no excuses for trashing his life.   Thanks to Gosling’s acting and the incisive detail which their writing and direction supplied, they succeeded.    The eponymous hero of their new film – Sugar is his nickname, Miguel Santos his real one – is a twenty-year-old from a village in the Dominican Republic.  Playing baseball at a professional academy, he’s already a local hero but his big chance comes when he’s signed up for training with a team in the North American minor league.

Miguel is impossible to dislike but not much easier to get interested in:  he’s a victim – without a will of his own (or, it has to be said, much personality) – of economic circumstance and culturally-conditioned aspiration.  Algenis Perez Soto – not a professional actor when Boden and Fleck discovered him (playing baseball with friends, according to Wikipedia) – is almost too aptly cast in the main role.  He is strikingly handsome, a fine camera subject (in purely visual terms) and suggests a genuinely sweet nature;  but Boden and Fleck’s decision to make Sugar as passive a figure as this makes the moral of their story too obvious.   Although they’re not strongly individualised, some of the other actors playing Dominican baseball hopefuls have an extrovert self-confidence which might have supplied dramatically compelling resistance to the cultural forces conspiring to thwart the characters in the story.  Miguel has a meekly unassertive quality from the outset – there’s no friction between a vigorous ambition and the circumstances which inexorably overpower him.

What happens to Miguel feels preconceived.  Nothing that he does makes any difference.  (I assume this is how Boden and Fleck see the situation of Dominicans migrating to what they hope will be big-time baseball.)  In the last scene of Sugar, Miguel – eventually acclimatising to a life in New York where he’s anonymous and can barely make ends meet – goes to a baseball field, named for his hero in the sport, the Puerto Rican Roberto Clemente.  Miguel takes part in an amateur knockabout, watched by a handful of spectators.  All the other players introduce themselves to him by their place of origin (they’re a mixture of Puerto Ricans, Mexicans and other Dominicans) and by the particular North American team they’ve failed to make the grade in.   The moment is instantaneously effective in making the film’s point but the implication is that Miguel epitomises dreams of glory which inevitably result in failure – an implication which Clemente’s own achievements (in an era in which, as the film elsewhere acknowledges, racial barriers to advancement were high) contradict.

The Wikipedia article on the film explains that Boden and Fleck:

‘… wrote the screenplay after researching about many Dominican immigrants who arrive in America to play in minor league towns, saying: “The stories we heard were so fascinating that it became what we were writing before we’d even decided it was our next project”.’

It seems Boden and Fleck got so interested in their subject that they lost sight of the need to animate it dramatically.  The fact that they’re dealing with a socially responsible, worthy theme may have made matters worse (this also explains why some critics overlook Sugar’s inadequacies).  The people and locations in Sugar are sometimes filmed as if they were part of a documentary – but the film-makers still fall back unimaginatively on the required elements of a price-of-fame story.  Miguel makes an inauspicious start to his first match for Kansas City Knights but, by the end of it, he’s a new star – in just the way that an aspiring singer in a rags-to-riches picture will falter initially but wow the audience by the end of their debut number.  The sexual misunderstandings, the drug use, the phone calls back to his loyal mother and girlfriend in the Dominican Republic are all part of a familiar menu – so familiar that Sugar doesn’t have any surprise or momentum.  (I felt differently about a sequence in which Miguel,m newly arrived in New York, can’t get his subway ticket to work in the machine – but only because of complete empathy with that particular experience.)

Many of the performances in the smaller parts suggest that the actors have been encouraged to play hyper-naturalistically – but without the material they need to get inside their character.  As a result, the line readings sound artificially dulled – as if the instinct to act in a more conventional style is merely being suppressed.   Although their roles aren’t freshly conceived, Michael Gaston (as the Kansas City Knights coach) and Jaime Tirelli (the Puerto Rican carpenter whom Miguel befriends in New York) are unusual among the large cast in creating characters that seem real and in drawing us in by their skill as performers.  In visual terms (the cinematographer was Andrij Parekh), Sugar often seems merely pictorial.  The shots of landscapes, for example, don’t mean much because they never seem connected to how Miguel (or anyone else) is looking at or feeling in them.   Michael Brook’s score is similarly impersonal – although Boden and Fleck give an emotional lift to the closing stages of the film by playing ‘Hallelujah’ (sung in Spanish) and, especially, the Moby song ‘In This World’ over the closing credits.   Even allowing for the fact that I’m not au fait with or interested in baseball, the sequences of the game being played are uninvolving and don’t build.   Boden and Fleck are clearly concerned to make something more than a sports film – so much so that they don’t bother to provide the visceral excitement that a sports film is naturally so well-equipped to supply.

Half Nelson was developed from a much shorter piece which had done well on an independent film festival circuit.  As I understand it, the short focused on the episode, retained and pivotal in the longer film, when the teenage girl discovers her teacher taking drugs – and described the complex bond which develops between them from sharing his guilty secret.  As a feature, Half Nelson is stretched pretty thin; it’s certainly no surprise to learn how the material originated.  But the kernel of the picture is strong enough to act as a stiffening agent to the padding.  Sugar is flaccid primarily because it lacks this kind of centre (the fact that the film-makers are working with a bigger budget – and cautiously as a result – may also be a factor).  I’d still go to see whatever Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck come up with next but I hope they realise from this failure that they need to dramatise themes and individualise characters in a film that’s well-meaning social critique just as much as when they’re presenting the portrait of a wilfully self-destructive egoist.

9 June 2009