Shrewdly taking a micro rather than macro approach to its socio-political issues, Sugar recounts a Dominican Republic pitching prospect’s attempts to make it in the big leagues without resorting to the type of clunky, moralizing commentary that its fish-out-of-water story could easily have indulged in. Exhibiting more delicacy and restraint than their prior Half Nelson, writer/directors Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck refuse to turn the saga of Miguel “Sugar” Santos (Algenis Perez Soto) into an overarching parable about the immigrant experience, American intolerance, or any of the other big-picture issues that it naturally grazes. Any larger implications are allowed to resound only in the context of Sugar’s specific experiences transitioning from the D.R. to the alien milieu of Bridgetown, Iowa and the Single-A minor league squad that gives him his shot. When Sugar and his Latino teammates get into a scuffle with local white men unhappy about the foreigners dancing with blonde women, the incident may reflect ingrained societal intolerance but, shot with impressive understatement, resonates primarily as an example of Sugar’s estrangement from his environment. And when Sugar watches a TV broadcast of Hurricane Katrina refugees praying in the Superdome, the moment doesn’t conflate Sugar and African-Americans’ plights so much as further hammer home his ignorance about, and disconnection from, his bewildering, racially charged, devoutly religious surroundings.

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As you'll learn from my annual top ten list, coming soon to this very spot, I am much enamored of Kelly Reichardt's Wendy and Lucy.  Formally, it's one of the simplest films I've seen all year, focusing as it does on a young female drifter passing through the Pacific Northwest with her beloved dog:  but through its slow build, it manages to turn into a highly emotional thriller that blends elements of nostalgia, wistfulness, bitterness, anger and shame into one of the most arresting pieces of narrative in a good while.  It's one of the few non-documentary films in recent American cinema with the courage to address economic issues in a way that's routinely done in foreign film, and it contains a number of quiet but very effective performances.

In an interview at IFC's website, director Kelly Reichardt -- who first came to my attention with the excellent Old Joy -- discusses the making of the film, the uncertaintly of bringing in a new cast, and how the idea for it came to be -- not so oddly, once you've seen it, the genesis of Wendy and Lucy  was a number of conversations Reichardt had over various reactions to the Hurricane Katrina disaster.  "These people, living in such peril, they wouldn't be in the the shape they're in, the position they're in," she says of the responses of many Americans to the misfortune of New Orleans' poor.  "If you don't have a net and you've had a shitty education and you don't have the benefit of family that's in any better situation than you're in, how does one improve their lot?  Not even reaching the middle class, but how do you just get a toehold in the next level?  That was the seed."

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