American Dream: "Sugar" (2008)

With baseball season just getting underway, I would be remiss if I didn't blog about America's pastime and my favorite sport in some shape or form. The other night I had the opportunity to watch an awesome movie called Sugar, suggested by a friend as an instant classic. The movie is a story of Miguel "Sugar" Santos, a Dominican kid living a different life than most of his peers. Sugar is enrolled in a baseball academy in the Dominican Republic, in hopes of honing his already phenomenal pitching abilities in order to save his family from their impoverished lives. Spending his weekends in a shack and his weekdays in a beautiful school, Miguel lives a double life, teetering between poverty and wealth. He is a celebrity around his village, and kids emulate him and his opportunity for a better life. His hope is to move to America and strike it rich playing major league baseball. After developing a nasty pitching repertoire, Sugar tries out for a major league team and he is signed to a deal with their single-A farm team in Iowa. With his dream seemingly coming true at the young age of nineteen, Sugar thinks he's on the fast track. Sugar lives with an American family that also houses a veteran teammate, Jorge, who is also Dominican and have traveled the same path as Sugar. Miguel finds it difficult to adjust to speaking English and living in a foreign land away from his family. Sugar's dominance on the field ends when he injures himself on a routine play. This injury would prove to be fatal to Miguel's dream, taking away his motivation and drive to play the game. Eventually, a new Dominican prospect begins to push Sugar out of the rotation, and at that point Miguel decides to leave baseball and his dream behind. Sugar moves to New York City to try to find his own American Dream, but again struggles to assimilate into American society. He eventually finds refuge with other Dominican baseball players who failed in the same quest.

This movie examines a culture in the Dominican that has produced some great baseball players, most notably Sammy Sosa and David Ortiz. These children's lives revolve around baseball, with their families hoping that they will be one of the lucky ones to make it big. Their American Dream therefore revolves around the money and fame achieved from being a professional athlete. But as we learn through Miguel in the movie, money does not buy happiness. His loneliness consumes him, although he is amidst the dream that he had worked so hard to achieve. His failure to achieve his dreams and the dreams of his family may have actually made him happier though, finding a community of friends in NYC and pursuing another dream, although it may not be what he had planned. This movie shows that the American Dream may not necessarily revolve around money and prosperity, but instead around happiness and camaraderie.