Colin Farrell’s Sugar will have you hooked
California’s mean streets are lent a warm touch of nostalgia in a private detective series armed with film noir sentiment
Sugar invites us to take a little nostalgic ride through the mean streets of TV’s private detective neighbourhoods. And while they seem a little familiar at first, this new show from Apple takes a different perspective on the fateful coincidences, double crosses, misdirections and femme fatales that usually characterise the longstanding precinct. It’s one that has all but disappeared from a TV that is saturated with law enforcement, investigators now largely working within the system, the private dick a relic of the past.
Sugar, starring Colin Farrell as the titular, enigmatic private detective, John Sugar, revives the character of the isolated, and alienated gumshoe, a loner with his own brand of honour and integrity. His archetype descends from the American way of crime decades earlier, featuring those hard-nosed investigators from between hard covers and on screen – J.B. Priestly called them “telegrams from hell” – who operated in a “world of greed, of calculated violence and a cold sensuality.”
But ambitiously, Sugar is also at times a pleasing homage to those noir movies from the 1940s and 50s, which featured the character of the hard-boiled detective. John Sugar loves noir movies, you see. The series incorporates slices of crime films from Hollywood’s golden age, like The Maltese Falcon and Sunset Boulevard, into the story of Sugar’s search for a missing woman in Los Angeles.
The first episode features moments from Kiss Me Deadly and The Big Heat and the LA of Sugar is just as mean as anything from Raymond Chandler, original creator of the classic noir investigator. His city was a refuge of scoundrels and Sugar’s, so vividly created in this series, is just as sinister; violence even closer to the surface. As Chandler wrote, “Anything can happen.”
Sugar was created by Mark Protosevich and executive produced by Simon Kinberg and Audrey Chon of Genre Films, the production company founded by screenwriter-producer-director Kinberg. He’s an experienced writer and director once named by The Hollywood Reporter as the highest-paid screenwriter in Hollywood with a record US$16 million ($24.5m) for two X-Men scripts. Chon was executive producer on Jordan Peele’s The Twilight Zone, also for Kinberg’s Genre Films.
The series is directed by Brazilian filmmaker, Fernando Meirelles with his long-time editor, Fernando Stutz, also creatively and conceptually involved. The director is best known for the Oscar-nominated City of God and The Constant Gardener, and together they create for the show a startling visual language characterised by its stylistic underpinnings of noir.
And it’s a series for anyone who loves cinema, Sugar a cinephile in the sense Susan Sontag once described as those possessed of a love that only cinema inspires. “It was born of the conviction that cinema was an art unlike any other: quintessentially modern; distinctively accessible; poetic and mysterious and erotic and moral — all at the same time,” she wrote at a time when she believed cinema was an art unlike any other.
With Sugar, haunted by an unknown traumatic past, hard for him to even talk about, it’s obvious that movies from the past have been his escape, possibly redemption. As they may have been for his creator, the series expressing his own feelings about movies.
“It’s disappointing to me that there are so many young people and even people who want to get into making films, who don’t know the history of the medium, who don’t have an understanding of what great films came from the silent era through the 30s and 40s and 50s and 60s,” Protosevich says.
His original script, written on spec, was not explicitly filled with the references to old movies but Kinberg says it was in its DNA, there in the descriptions, the dialogue and the storytelling. “He is a real cinephile who loves film noir and we do, too. For me, it was a combo of those classics of 40s and 50s American cinema and film noir, with grittier ones like Chinatown from the 70s. Infusing Sugar a little bit with the genuinely darker underbelly and more morally complex movies from the 70s was part of the formula concoction that we put together for the show.”
Somewhat ironically, the intercutting of the period movies came from the interaction of Meirelles and his editor, the director given 15 films to watch by Protosevich, which were then passed to Stutz. Both recognised lines in his script from the movies or as specific situations used by the writer and the editor, and as the rushes began to appear, began to experiment by combining them with cuts from the films.
Protosevich says the major influence on his concept was Murder, My Sweet, the 1944 adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s Farewell My Lovely, starring Dick Powell, Chandler’s legendary private eye Philip Marlowe. At its centre is a missing person case, also the framing narrative device for Sugar.
And, as in Chandler’s novel and its movie version, the mystery element of Sugar’s story is less important than atmosphere and character: for Chandler, how Marlowe reacts and what he makes of what happens around him is the focus, not hidden clues. “What the hell happened,” Chandler said, “rather than whodunit.” And this is what interests Protosevich in this series.
“A big thing about this for me was writing something about someone who’s good, who tries to do the right thing, who is capable of violence, but doesn’t like violence, but can show kindness and empathy and understanding of people. You’re taking this noble guy who realises that the world isn’t a noble place. The world doesn’t obey the same kind of moral principles that he does. He’s resigned himself to that.”
It begins in Japan, shot initially in black and white, Sugar investigating the kidnapping of a young boy, son of a Yakuza boss. He finds the perpetrator in an apartment, the man refusing to give the boy up. Sugar rescues him with some neat, unarmed combat moves, managing to take a knife wound to the shoulder and a tear to his Saville Row suit.
“I don’t like hurting people, it’s true,” Sugar says in voice-over. “This world has more than enough suffering without extra contributions from me. Finding people that are lost, bringing them back to those that miss them. That part of the job I like – it makes the occasional knife fight and a ruined suit all right.”
Then Sugar is in LA at the home of his handler Ruby (Kirby Howell-Baptiste), who organises his cases and looks after his cherished movie magazines when he’s away. He’s late, he tells her, because on the way from the airport he visited the home of Jonathan Siegel (James Cromwell), a legendary Hollywood producer, who emailed him about the case of his missing daughter, asking his help. “When a client reaches out to you directly, it’s disrespectful,” Ruby reminds Sugar. “You’re my business.”
Nonetheless, she hands him what he’ll need for the case – his renewed California private investigator license, driver’s license, and a concealed-carry permit for the gun Glenn Ford used in The Big Heat.
A flashback takes us to his meeting with Siegal, Sugar a little starstruck. Siegel’s granddaughter Olivia has been missing for two weeks. A former drug addict, she has a habit of temporarily disappearing, so this might just be another of her misadventures. But Siegal is worried.
Soon Sugar is on the road in his baby-blue vintage Corvette, images from the movies he loves juxtaposed with compromising polaroids, bodies in the trunks of cars, and the city’s secret clubs. He encounters Melanie Matthews in a bar, Olivia’s former stepmom and a former legendary rock star. She’s superbly played by Amy Ryan, a siren luring men to self-destruction, knowing but strikingly vulnerable. And his quest takes shape.
Farrell, too, is wonderful here, a far cry from his last TV appearance, as the brutish, pitiless Henry Drax in The North Water, a legendary harpooner who has signed on for a six-month voyage on a Greenland whaler, the Volunteer.
As Sugar, though, he’s oddly tender, apologetic for violence and does good deeds for strangers in need of succour. The wise guy coolness just conceals the taut self-control but there’s a human complexity in Farrell’s Sugar missing from the hard-boiled heroes of the films he admires, and little of their world weariness or bleak pessimism.
I’m enjoying this show enormously. Some American critics disliked the series, finding its self-consciously noir references predictable and somewhat banal. I enjoyed them but then I always have had a soft spot for the hard-boiled.
As a kid, living in the outer suburban blandness of Reservoir to the dusty north of Melbourne, after discovering the Americans Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, and later Ross MacDonald, I became obsessed with the mean streets of the crime novelist’s California.
I wanted to spend my life knocking at doors in cheap, ratty hotels that nobody bothered to open, where only people named Jones and Smith signed the register; see the whole San Fernando Valley spread out before me, a thousand white houses, 10,000 lighted windows and the stars hanging down over them politely, not getting too close.
So Sugar’s got me hooked.
Sugar is streaming on Apple TV+