Puerile teen humour and maudlin sentiment clash awkwardly in this underpowered second feature from British writer/director George Jaques, which captures one crazy summer at a camp for a group of young people in the midst of cancer care. Jaques has spoken in the media about how his intentions for this film were to avoid the downbeat clichés of depicting cancer sufferers on screen and instead make something that’s more joyful. The problem is that this mode of “Always look on the bright side of life” sugar-frosting is the cliché, and so what we have here comes across like a warmed-over feature episode of TV’s roistering teen drama, Skins, albeit with the spectre of death hanging over the heads of the majority of the cast. Much of it means well, but very little actually lands in an impactful way.
At the centre of the story is Bella Ramsey’s Ivy who has passed through a course of chemotherapy successfully though is still smarting from the shock of her diagnosis. She has become an Angry Young Woman, and her folks (Jessica Gunning and James Norton) believe the best course of action would be to pack her off to camp so she can hang out with some people who can actually empathise with her situation, as they have been through it themselves. Neil Patrick Harris crops up as the cool dad camp controller, firing off the occasional wisdom bomb while attempting to quell Ivy’s sense of pent-up rage at the universe. Yet most of the action is focused on a group of teens going through a classic rite of passage, but with a big existential twist.
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Among the gang of sweary scamps are Ruby Stokes’ sex-mad Ella, Earl Cave’s gothy edgelord Ralph, Jasmine Elcock’s outspoken Maisie, and Conrad Khan’s lovable dweeb Archie, and through them we chart Ivy’s swift rise from scowling outsider to leader of the pack. The writing mixes in groan-worthy christmas cracker jokes with a torrent of wellbeing platitudes, and the situations the teens find themselves in are never exciting or original enough to really make the film feel genuinely absorbing. The best scenes involve Ivy’s visits to camp psychologist Lucy (Shalom Brune-Franklin), as they’re the only part of the film where Jaques is forced to talk seriously about the realities of living with or surviving cancer without leaning the crutch of silly humour to undercut the pathos.
Two things you could infer about Jaques from seeing Sunny Dancer is that he hasn’t seen that many films (it does look like something for the small screen), and that he adores the music of the Scissor Sisters, as their 2006 earworm, ‘I Don’t Feel Like Dancin’’ plays out multiple times across the film. A cameo from balladeer James Blunt, who belts out a rendition of his hit, ‘Beautiful’, is presented without irony, and the levels of doe-eyed sentiment almost become too much to bear. Mawkishness aside, during the film’s second half the focus gravitates towards Ivy’s burgeoning relationship with Jake (Daniel Quinn-Toye) who is still fighting for his health. Despite the details of their sweet early courtship, the way things play out eventually make the whole sub-plot feel like a stern lesson in acceptance and ways to process grief. It’s a noble effort, and it’s laudable that Jaques clearly hasn’t got a cynical bone in his body, but it’s too much of a soft take on a very hard subject.