Sugar & Spice (2001)

Official trailer

Sugar & Spice is Francine McDougall’s 2001 American crime comedy depicting a high school cheerleading squad whose lead member becomes pregnant by the team’s quarterback and convinces the other cheerleaders to rob a bank to support her impending parenthood.

Marley Shelton plays Diane Weston. Mena Suvari plays Kansas Hill. Marla Sokoloff plays Lisa Janusch. Rachel Blanchard plays Hannah Wold. Melissa George plays Cleo Miller. Alexandra Holden plays Fern Rogers. Sara Marsh plays Lucy. James Marsden plays Jack Bartlett. Sean Young plays Mrs. Hill. Mandy Nelson wrote the screenplay.

New Line Cinema released the film in January 2001 to modest commercial reception and wide later cult reputation through home-video and cable circulation across the 2000s and 2010s. A cheerleading squad robbing banks sounds like a one-joke movie, and this one is a lot more fun than it has any business being. It’s sharp, it’s mean in the right places, and it’s smarter about its narrator than I expected. What holds it at a 7 is the flat direction and a handful of broad gags that don’t work.

Sugar & Spice is cheerleader-cinema crime caper with considerably more genre-craftsmanship than its modest theatrical reception suggested. Mandy Nelson’s screenplay treats the bank-robbery cheerleader premise with sustained comic commitment while delivering character work that exceeds the genre’s typical handling. The film’s framing device of Lisa Janusch’s police-interrogation testimony allows the screenplay to deliver the heist material through unreliable-narrator structure, with the closing-act revelations about Lisa’s specific role within the cheerleader hierarchy giving the film its actual structural payoff.

Marley Shelton, Mena Suvari, and the ensemble cast bring full commitment to material that later decades have considerably reappraised.

The Framing Device

Mandy Nelson’s screenplay structures the entire film as Lisa Janusch’s police-interrogation testimony, with the bank-robbery events told through her flashback narration. The framing device gives the screenplay serious structural flexibility: the audience experiences events through Lisa’s particular perspective with all the limitations that imposes, and the closing-act revelations about Lisa’s actual social position within the cheerleader hierarchy are both character-development resolution and structural reveal.

Marla Sokoloff plays Lisa with sustained envious resentment about her position within the cheerleader squad. Lisa is the disgruntled cheerleader B-team member who was excluded from the main heist plan because the lead cheerleaders didn’t trust her. Her testimony to the police consequently is both real information delivery and resentful score-settling. The structural choice gives the film major replay value as audiences recognize the narration’s certain bias.

I love the Lisa framing. Sokoloff plays her so sour and so sure of herself that I started doubting her testimony long before the film told me to, and the payoff makes that doubt worth it.

Marley Shelton’s Diane

Marley Shelton plays Diane Weston as the conventionally-perfect popular-girl character who happens to be planning bank robberies. The character’s combination of standard high-school-popular-girl signifiers (perfect makeup, perfect cheerleading skills, perfect grades) with the actual criminal-mastermind activities gives Shelton serious dramatic range to work with across the running time.

Diane’s certain moral position within the film is the screenplay’s central ambiguity. The character loves her boyfriend Jack and is willing to commit serious crimes to support their future together; the screenplay treats her actions as both affectionate parental commitment and as substantively criminal behavior. Shelton’s performance refuses to resolve the ambiguity. That gives the film its actual moral weight. Shelton is the reason the film works for me. She plays Diane sweet enough that I’m rooting for her and unhinged enough that I’m a little scared of her, often in the same scene.

The Ensemble Cast

Sugar & Spice’s ensemble cast includes real individual performances beyond Shelton’s lead. Mena Suvari plays the troubled-home cheerleader Kansas with distinct damaged-character commitment that the surrounding production’s broader comic tone could have undermined. Rachel Blanchard plays the religious-conservative cheerleader Hannah with sustained earnest seriousness that the satirical material requires. Melissa George plays the new-girl cheerleader Cleo with considerably more dramatic weight than the supporting role might have suggested.

Sean Young’s significant supporting performance as Kansas’s mother Mrs. Hill gives the film its strongest single dramatic sequence. The character is incarcerated in a women’s prison and her recognition that her daughter is following her into criminal activity gives the screenplay its serious emotional core. Young’s performance refuses every available cliché about prison-mother dramatic conventions.

Sean Young’s prison scene is the one that surprised me. In a comedy about cheerleaders robbing banks, she finds something sad and real, and I’d have taken more of her.

Is Sugar & Spice worth watching?

It’s a 7 from me. The framing device, Shelton’s Diane and Sean Young’s prison scene make it smarter than its reputation, and I enjoy it more than most comedies of that era. The direction is plain and some jokes go broader than the characters deserve, and that’s what keeps it out of the 8s. If you like crime capers with a mean streak, give it a night.

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