Plot
London, World War II. Welsh poet Dylan Thomas (Rhys) is in love with both his wife Caitlin (Miller) and his childhood friend Vera (Knightley), now married to the devoted William (Murphy).
But Dylan’s refusal to commit to one woman could destroy the lives of all of them...
VerdictThe cast is strong and the first act has an intriguingly dreamy quality, but it gives way to a soggy ending.
There is something undeniably noble and beautiful about the love of sports: the appreciation of grace and excellence for their own sakes, the pleasure of competition, the discipline of training. But the practice of big-time sports is often cruel and corrupt, a business built on the exploitation of young people and the peddling of impossible dreams. This basic contradiction will be in vivid evidence this weekend, during the national college basketball championships. It is also, at least implicitly, a central concern in “Sugar,” a wise and lovely new film by Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck.
It is their belief in the dignity of the sport that allows Ms. Boden and Mr. Fleck to turn a quietly critical eye on its economic workings and social consequences. Though it tells a fictional story, “Sugar” belongs on a shelf with “Hoop Dreams,” another great film that challenges us to shed our illusions about sports even as we retain our capacity to delight in the games themselves.
Miguel Santos is certainly capable of such delight. Nicknamed Azúcar (Spanish for sugar), and played by a marvelously expressive and likable young nonprofessional actor named Algenis Pérez Soto, he is sweet and easygoing, but also fiercely competitive and a bit cocky.
Like many young Dominican men who demonstrate some baseball talent, he was signed by an American professional team (the fictitious Kansas City Knights) as a teenager. Sugar and his fellow recruits live in a training center that in some ways resembles a prep school, in others a prison. An armed guard stands at the gate, and practices are observed from what looks like a guard tower.
On weekends, Miguel goes home to his village to visit with his family and his girlfriend, and to hang out with slightly older men whose own dreams of major-league glory have evaporated or expired.
In their previous feature, “Half Nelson,” Ms. Boden and Mr. Fleck, a married couple who live in Brooklyn, seemed at first to be working within a familiar, somewhat dubious genre, the heroic urban teacher melodrama. But by making the teacher in question (played by Ryan Gosling) not only a drug addict but also, more important, a complicated individual whose moral confusion was hard to separate from his political idealism, they upended easy, sentimental assumptions about race, class and urban life.
Something similar happens in “Sugar.” For more than half its running time the film seems to be following the narrative structure of a standard sports story, unfolding through the triumphs and reversals of a single, fateful season. After a stint in spring training in Arizona, Miguel finds himself in Iowa, boarding with an elderly local couple and trying out his stuff in front of some pretty demanding hometown crowds as a starting pitcher for the Bridgetown Swing.
Off the field he socializes with his fellow Spanish-speaking ballplayers, befriends a former college star and conducts a tentative flirtation with the strawberry-blond, churchgoing granddaughter of his hosts, who wants him for spiritual or carnal purposes, or both. (Here in America we may accept the constitutional separation of church and state, but church and sex are much harder to keep apart.) On the field Miguel hits his stride early, is slowed down by an injury, faces various temptations and then ...
But see for yourself. The game of baseball, ungoverned by the clock, is notoriously full of surprises, and the surprise of “Sugar” — I don’t mean the major third-act plot twist, which is astonishing when it happens and utterly logical in retrospect — is that it’s not really about baseball at all. It’s about, among other things, the way America looks through the eyes of a stranger, about the beauty of the Caribbean, the Midwest and the South Bronx (skillfully evoked by the cinematographer Andrij Parekh), and about what it is to be a young man full of desire and potential in a world that seems starkly divided between haves and have-nots, success and failure.
Perhaps nowhere are these divisions more extreme than in the world of professional sports, which beguiles some of the poorest people in the hemisphere with specters of fabulous wealth. But even in that world, a lot of space is taken up by the middle ground: the modest paychecks sent to the family back home; the careers that culminate neither in glory nor in disgrace, but that flare up and peter out; the tiny increment of luck or timing that separates strike three from ball four.
And so “Sugar” walks away from clichés about the thrill of victory or the agony of defeat, preferring to contemplate the satisfactions and frustrations that lie in between. It is both sad and hopeful, but the film’s sorrow and its optimism arise from its rarest and most thrilling quality, which is its deep and humane honesty.
A sweet, sharp coming-of-age romance, "Adventureland" is a little warmer, a little funnier and a lot more truthful than the last 20 or 30 of its ilk. Especially its Hollywood ilk.
You know the kind: R-rated comedies about socially maladroit horndogs on the brink of adulthood, partying, hooking up, throwing up, setting their sights on the rest of their lives. All this happens in "Adventureland"—set in 1987, mostly within the confines of a Pittsburgh amusement park—yet the characters, female as well as male, interact like real people, not stereotyped castoffs from John Hughes' '80s catalog. This third feature from writer-director Greg Mottola is reminiscent of Barry Levinson's "Diner" or Paul Mazursky's "Next Stop, Greenwich Village" or, more recently, Richard Linklater's "Dazed and Confused," personal projects (personal enough, at least, to make them ring true) made by astute populist entertainers. It's my favorite American movie so far this year.
Miramax Films financed "Adventureland" and premiered at this year's Sundance Film Festival. The studio is marketing it as another "Superbad," thereby guaranteeing a whole lot of confused teenagers who won't be getting the raunch they're promised, as well as guaranteeing a tough sell with an older crowd, the people with the most direct relationship to the film's setting, time frame and sensibility.
The movie's low-key appeal doesn't have a lot to do with "Superbad," which was, in fact, good, and was Mottola's second feature. (His engaging debut, "The Daytrippers," preceded it by more than a decade.) I guess I can't blame Miramax for capitalizing on what it sees as a film's commercial hooks, but at least one of the posters makes "Adventureland" look like it stars Bill Hader's porn-star mustache.
In the real leading role, Jesse Eisenberg of "The Squid and the Whale" plays James, a highly verbal, sexually tentative 22-year-old college graduate whose major in Renaissance studies has put him in a terrific position if, as he says, "someone wants help restoring a fresco." Despite the Reagan Revolution, everyone in "Adventureland" has serious, real-world money problems. When his upper-middle-class father (Jack Gilpin) suffers a setback at work, James must forgo the $900 earmarked as his European travel money. So he looks for work and ends up at Adventureland, where he's employed in one of the game booths. Over the summer, he enters, tentatively, the orbit of Em, played by Kristen Stewart of " Twilight."
This cool, wary figure represents the adventureland beyond Adventureland. Em's involved with the park's married maintenance man ( Ryan Reynolds), an arrangement that has begun to corrode her self image. To James, Em is the promise of a leap into adulthood. Other characters are played more for laughs, such as the park's husband-and-wife management team (Hader and Kristen Wiig), but the reason I fell for "Adventureland" has everything to do with its central couple, along with James' friendship with Joel, a pipe-smoking literature fiend and fellow Adventureland slacker played by Martin Starr. At one point, Joel and another staffer find themselves fairly drunk and unexpectedly close. "I'm so surprised I'm making out with you!" says the girl. "Me too," replies Joel, insulted and pleased in equal measure. Mottola's script is full of similarly spot-on exchanges.
Your response to "Adventureland" may well have a lot to do with your feelings about any of the following: a fine and mellow musical score by Yo La Tengo; the choice of "Bastards of Young" by The Replacements as the title sequence tune; and Eisenberg's exquisitely self-effacing comic timing, similar to Michael Cera's but drier.
The film doesn't try to make James into a fount of nobility or a moral paragon; it's a little painful, by design, watching this nice, smart kid try to ingratiate himself with the cool crowd by being the provider of the weed.
But the way their love story develops, Eisenberg and Stewart play off each other like magic. From an awkward, mistimed first kiss to a mega-happy happy ending, romantic but not candied, Mottola's trip down memory lane transcends every one of its familiar component parts. I'm eager to see it again.
FRUSTRATED teens, the roar of the railroad, killer ticks and Alec Baldwin: pretty much the way I've always seen Long Island.
A native, Derick Martini, sees it that way too, directing and co-writing (with his brother, Steve) a movie that gathers up a mass of their homeland and shapes it into something like art. "Lymelife," set amid marital decay and teen frustration, isn't quite the "American Beauty" of the 516 area code, but it'll do.
That's when Scott Bartlett (Rory Culkin), a shaggy 15-year-old, gets caught between playing with his "Star Wars" laser gun and the smile of his schoolmate (Emma Roberts, in her first R-rated part).
His real estate developer dad (Alec Baldwin) boasts that he's almost a millionaire, but his wife (Jill Hennessy) wishes the family still lived in Queens. For some reason, an older son (Kieran Culkin) is in the military and expecting to be called for the Falkland Islands war, which didn't start until three years later.
The developer's star employee (Cynthia Nixon, unconvincingly laying on the Lawn Guyland accent) is locked in an unhappy marriage with her husband, an unemployed fellow with unwashed hair and a deer rifle. I think this may be the first screen character I've encountered who's being driven into a psychotic haze by Lyme disease, and I give Timothy Hutton credit for investing the character with a full dose of creepiness.
Baldwin, who made this project happen by agreeing to shoot it while also doing "30 Rock" in the city, keeps his character balanced with obnoxious charm. No one could do better delivering this line, which the dad hurls up at his sulking son while the latter takes refuge on the roof: "Please come down here before f - - - ing Carvel closes."
The movie is more a setting with characters than a story, and its "Mean Streets" touches have been imitated in so many other films that they've come to seem pre-packaged. We don't need another scene in which a girl enters a room in slo-mo to the strains of a Motown song -- but the sequence works, and Martin Scorsese has blessed this project by taking an executive producer credit.
Martini brews a hazy feeling out of memory and time, a sense of relief and regret in the knowledge that nothing so exotic as ordinary suburban puberty can ever happen to you again.
