Where to watch Sugar & Spice
3 Stars
Jack and Diane were lovers, two crazy kids living in the heartlands. Airheaded Diane captains the cheerleading squad, who follow her through whatever she does. Jack is, of course, the football team’s star quarterback. When Diane becomes pregnant, the two are thrown out of their homes and move into an apartment where they try to live on Jack’s part-time salary from clerking at a video store. Meanwhile both continue in school – cheerleading and quarterbacking. When Diane realizes that they’re not making it financially, she recruits the other cheerleaders to help her rob a bank. Their cheerleader oath of all for one commits them to helping her. A local hood gives them guns in exchange for their promise to put his homely daughter on the cheerleading squad.
Sugar & Spice is the most cynically hilarious look at high school social politics since Heathers. The acidic screenplay by scribe Mandy Nelson is both satirical and delicious in its deconstruction of hierarchies of teens at a fictional school. The story is framed like a film-noir police procedural, with Marla Sokoloff recounting the increasingly desperate antics of the adored cheerleading squad led by Melissa George.
James Marsden and George have great chemistry, and despite his unwavering enthusiastic optimism and her growing fatalism, you find yourself rooting for the kids to make it. Francine McDougall has envisioned a colorful, antiseptic suburban environment that masks the dirty deeds carried out by the teenage girls in a society that will let teens have kids but then denies them a loan to rent a place. The harsh realities of teen pregnancy, life-altering criminal decisions, and keeping up with the Joneses are explored in a comedic manner by the filmmakers.
Sugar & Spice reminds me of Jawbreakers, another dark comedy set in an American high school, and the film has a lot more to say than I was expecting from a movie that was advertised as a zany, raunchy, wannabe American Pie. So, it’s no wonder why the movie utterly failed at the box office. While Alexander Payne’s Election is often cited as a seminal film of the late 1990s, and I agree, Sugar & Spice is an equally entertaining film and would make for a great double feature.
Directed by: Francine McDougall
Written by: Mandy Nelson
Starring: Marla Sokoloff, Marley Shelton, Melissa George