Field of broken dreams
Sugar is definitely not your typical sports film. Though it starts out as a fairy tale sort of story about a young baseball player from the Dominican Republic with some big dreams of pitching in the big league, it turns more into a story about idols – and the destruction of those idols.
It also seemed to me that the writers were very familiar with the struggles of foreigners trying to make their way in a new culture (a subject close to my heart). At one point the main character goes to live with a midwestern Presbyterian family in Iowa. He speaks almost no English, and as the woman shows him around the house she tells him about the washing machine. She throws in a few Spanish words just to make sure he “understands,” and she tells him to put the “sopa” in the washing machine. “Sopa,” of course, isn’t soap.
It’s soup.