Sugar

Sugar - Monday, April 27th at 4:50 p.m. at the AMC

I got my back to the sun 'cause the light is too intense
I can see what everybody in the world is up against
You can't turn back - you can't come back, sometimes we push too far
One day you'll open up your eyes and you'll see where we are

Bob Dylan

Two weeks ago, when I saw Sugar, I was smitten, the kind of tender smart movie I fall in love with, and dote forever upon. Sugar's one of those rags-to-riches Land of Opportunity movies - America as seen by the outsider, scrambling in. (Think of the great ones - Kite Runner, Avalon, The Visitor, In America, The Namesake and of course the greatest, Godfather II). First of all, Sugar is full of craft - three compact acts, each beautifully delineated, clever dialogue, a gorgeous, lanky hunk of a moviestar-in-waiting, the kind of 1940s Hollywood studio skills we see so seldom these days. Who could resist?

Then again, I've been a baseball nut all my life. So any movie that references Roberto Clemente and Vic Power has suckered me, going in. Indeed, as a kid, I watched Vic Power, play first base for the Syracuse Chiefs. However I never heard this Vic Power anecdote, alluded to in Sugar, Once in a Syracuse restaurant, an embarrassed waiter shuffled over to Power and explained, I’m sorry, sir, we don’t serve colored people.

That’s OK, said Vic. I don’t eat colored people.

I don't want to even hint at the many sympathetic perceptions of this movie. However, here's my take - some subtext for cinephiles whose first love may be neither baseball nor Caribbean politics. In other words matters not dealt with overtly in the movie.

Sugar, the nickname of the movie's central character, may also evoke American sugar plantations that brought baseball with them first to Cuba in the 1860's then spread, plantation by plantation, throughout the Caribbean. By the 1920's indentured Dominican sugar workers were competing, plantation against plantation throughout the Caribbean.

One of the poorest of poor Dominican Republic cities, San Pedro de Macoris (population 200,000) is a centre of American sugar interests - mills, rummeries and plantations. The city also enjoys a second honour - world capital of Dominican baseball and the Cradle of Shortstops (Robinson Cano, Mariano Duncan, José Offerman, Tony Fernandez, Manny Lee). Why? Because San Pedro de Macoris is so dirt poor, baseballs careen in every possible direction off their pebbled infields. Only the most dextrous, make it off the island. From San Pedro de Macoris, young, poor kids dream of liberating their mammas from garment factories, escaping their ramshackle shacks with their bats and balls. Indeed, the movie Sugar opens in a multimillion-dollar player development complex, owned by a fictitious Kansas City team. 30% of all minor league ballplayers are imported from the Dominican Republic - underpinning much of baseball's economic prosperity. Of course, most wannabes never make it to the bigs, fewer still become stars.

President Obama, ardent Chicago White Sox fan, has spent his last couple of weeks, tamping down fractious U.S. relations with the Americas - first in Mexico, then in Trinidad. One of those he met was Venezuelan president, Hugo Chavez - socialist and self-proclaimed revolutionary - whose own wannabe dream as a kid was to pitch for the San Francisco Giants. Chavez indeed escaped poverty thanks to his skills as a pitcher (And remember, Fidel, before his revolutionary days, was another wannabe pitcher).

Venezuela, rich in natural resources, outside the Middle East, is the number one supplier of oil to the world. It's also - next to the DR - baseball's 2nd greatest exporter of ballplayers to America (including superstars Johan Santana, Magglio Ordonez and Miguel Cabrera). As with oil, Chavez wants to tax Major League Baseball for exploiting his country's natural resources, arguing that American baseball loves Latinos only because they sign Venezuelan kids for pennies, dispose of them like the trash, and face contact lens-thin regulations for their troubles. Chavez is on record as demanding owners pay for their pillaging, demanding player protections, requiring signing bonuses be paid through the government.

So baseball is now exiting Venezuela. Heaven forfend! We just figured we might as well do it [then] to avoid some of the hassle of having to deal with some of the legislation that [President Hugo] Chávez passes down there in hiring coaches, worrying about severance pay and just getting in and out of the country," said Juan Lara, San Diego's Latin American operations coordinator. Of course there's nothing political about a multibillion-dollar business running roughshod over a nation with no accountability for the dashed dreams of the 99% who don’t make it stateside.

Hugo Chavez may not be the craziest Venezuelan that President Obama ever met. That honour may fall to the manager of President Obama's favorite team - White Sox manager Ozzie Guillen, whose mouth never met a situation for which it didn't have a quip. Guillen once traded away a player, because 'he went into 2nd base as if his wife was turning the double play.

So while baseball lore is central to Sugar's mythos, Sugar - not a baseball movie - explores Sugar Daddy imperialism through the Caribbean and Latin America. And American ambivalence towards its 13.5 million Latinos. New York, for example, is now the 2nd largest Dominican Republic city in the world. Ah baseball! You gotta love it!






peter