Film reviews: Tony | Sunny Dancer
Matt Johnson’s film about the early life of the late chef and TV star Anthony Bourdain is more subdued than you might expect, writes Alistair Harkness
Tony (15) ★★★
Sunny Dancer (15) ★★★
“A shiftless, untrustworthy coke-sniffer, sneak thief and corner-cutting hack” was how the late chef and TV star Anthony Bourdain described his younger self in his rip-snorting memoir Kitchen Confidential. That’s maybe the Bourdain we’d have got had David Fincher ever directed Seared, his proposed Kitchen Confidential adaptation back in 2000. In Tony, Matt Johnson’s more sentimental origins story, we get only flashes of the culinary artist as a young, arrogant asshole.
Played by The Holdovers’ Dominic Sessa, the self-styled “Tony” may be full of piss and vinegar, but mostly his bravado is an easily demolished front for some deep-rooted insecurities that his hyper-critical mother (Dagmara Dominczyk) zeroes in on with precision accuracy. That’s about the extent to which the film is prepared to foreshadow the despair that undercut Bourdain’s life; mercifully it doesn’t try to connect the dots between his 19-year-old self and his suicide in 2018. And yet knowledge of his tragic fate still hangs over proceedings and may be why this portrayal of Bourdain – for all the character’s nascent bad-boy posturing – is more subdued than you might expect.
The film also narrows its entire focus to the summer of 1975 when Bourdain ended up in the seaside resort of Provincetown after failing to secure a writing fellowship. Dejected, he decides instead to put his energies into hooking up with his old high school crush (Emilia Jones), following her to Cape Cod and promptly getting into a drunken bar brawl that leaves him black-eyed, penniless and forced to take a job washing dishes in a low-rent seafood joint run by a kindly chef (Antonio Banderas). Simultaneously conceited and impressionable, Tony soon falls in with the restaurant’s rag-tag crew of reprobates, particularly Sal, its womanising, drug-guzzling sous chef, played here with quietly confident movie-star cool by Leo Woodall.
What follows is immensely pleasurable to watch in places, and Johnson builds up to a surprisingly poignant ending. But it’s mostly a film about Bourdain falling in love with the drama and chaos of the kitchen. His love of food came later and, frustratingly, that’s the essential ingredient missing here.
Bella Ramsay (The Last of Us) takes the lead in Sunny Dancer, a well-intentioned British coming-of-age film about a summer camp for teens with cancer, shot (but not set) in Scotland. She plays 17-year-old Ivy, who’s been in remission for ten months, but is full of anger and struggling to get back to being a regular kid. And so her lovingly embarrassing parents (Jessica Gurning and James Norton) sign her up for what she disparagingly dismisses as “chemo camp”, only to find it populated by like-minded weirdoes determined to have the sort of debauched fun not endorsed by the relentlessly chipper camp leader (Neal Patrick Harris).
Written and directed by 25-year-old actor-turned-filmmaker Georges Jacques, the film serves up a barrage of spiky lines that can feel a little try-hard in such a conventionally shot film. But once it settles into its own rhythm, they also help it avoid some of the more mawkish traps a subject like this can throw up.
Both films are on general release from 14 August
The Scotsman’s arts newsletter is now sent twice a week - subscribe today
Enjoying the Arts & Culture journalism on scotsman.com? Make it easier to find by selecting us as a preferred Google source
Want the latest Scottish headlines sent directly to your phone? Sign up to our new WhatsApp channel here
Comments
Want to join the conversation? Please or to comment on this article.