'Sugar' : change-up at sports film clichés

With "Sugar," writing-directing partners Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck have pulled off the kind of miraculous trick Darren Aronofsky did last year with "The Wrestler." They've taken an overly familiar, potentially cliched sports story, stripped it down and, in doing so, completely reinvented it.Rather than focusing on an athlete past his prime, Boden and Fleck tell the tale of a baseball player on the rise — a subgenre with all its own formulas and expectations. "Sugar" defies them every time. No score swells to a crescendo when Dominican pitcher Miguel "Sugar" Santos experiences his first triumph on the mound in the United States.There's no slo-mo of the ball leaving his hand on a magical summer night and landing with an amplified thud in the catcher's mitt. Even the obligatory training montage feels different, accompanied by a song from TV on the Radio. Instead, you get pure, intimate and — above all — honest storytelling, the same approach they took with their outstanding 2006 debut, "Half Nelson."It's so fundamental and compelling, it makes you wonder why more filmmakers don't jettison the gimmickry and pursue such a powerful path. ("Sugar" might seem too slow at times; then again, some complain that baseball itself is too slow. They're the ones on whom the intricacies of throwing a knuckle curve, Sugar's toughest pitch, will be lost.)

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