Sunshine on Leith (2013)

Rating: 2.5/5

I wasn't sure whether or not I had high hopes for Sunshine on Leith. A new musical film based on the lives of two Scottish soldiers when they return home really held a lot of potential, if handled in the right manner. However, the music is really the biggest problem with the movie, and seemingly the biggest point, meaning that the best threads of the storyline are eventually lost among a flurry of cheesy Proclaimers remixes and humdrum dance numbers. The first ten or fifteen minutes are enjoyable and made to work: its establishing shot is a cooling blue dusky landscape, as a row of tanks roll into view, and within we are introduced to Davy (George McKay) and Ally (Kevin Guthrie), and as the rumbles of nearby explosion work up a beat, the soldiers one by one start singing in harmony. The context is believable - for a musical, at least - and this wonderful crescendo builds up to a shock.

The boys are discharged and sent back home. Harry is back to his family, dad Rab (Peter Mullan), mum Jean (Jane Horrocks) and sister Liz (Freya Mavor), who is Ally's sort-of girlfriend. From this point, they could have gone one of two ways: a decent, truthful, heartfelt story about how the boys adjust to life again, and how their absence and experience have effected their relationships, or...the way the film actually goes. Too bad. 

Towards the end of the fifteen-minute success streak, the boys break into their first real musical number (I'm On My Way) and it works. It garnered surprised chuckles from the audience, and it is genuinely joyous and introduced with natural flow. However, they are soon down the pub with their local buddies, and the needless, gratuitous, ill-fitting music starts pouring. And, from this point on, the music gets repetitive. Maddeningly so. Consider, for example, a three minute sequence filled almost entirely by the phrase "My heart was broken - sorrow" in some form or other, with the odd word in between to keep audiences from noticing. This is the formula that the rest of the musical score follows, and it is decidedly dreary.

The songs of a musical should fit into place perfectly, with normal life being led in a natural way into song. This is quite difficult to achieve, as the makers here have found. It's just not as simple as finding a place to drop a song every 10-12 minutes. These musical numbers feel wearing, and tiring. The boys throw back their arms and puff out their chests as they sing, and artificial mania ensues. One or two were better than others, mainly featuring other minor characters that should have been further developed, like the local barman, and Jean's boss Harry. I may also add that where a musical has to depend greatly on overall performances, almost every actor's singing is below average here.

So, if we can't like the music, there must be a great storyline to fall back on? No such luck. Now we go into major cliché mode, and I started to lose track of how many times I rolled my eyes or sighed. Every main fella in this movie has a woman he loves but is in some kind of trouble with. Rab, the most endearing and genuine of the characters, finds out he has a 25 year old daughter he never knew, Ally is turned down in his marriage proposal, and Davy's sort-of girlfriend he only just met gets mad at him for getting caught in a punch-up. Her reaction is the most ridiculous. After a cringeworthy moment when all three women storm out of a party together, leaving the three men standing clueless, Davy's 'lass' Yvonne (Antonia Thomas) decides that after a minor falling out with a man she only just got with, she simply must pack up everything, quit her nursing job at the hospital and leave Scotland forever the very next day. Then, of course, we get the "You're too late Davy, she's already gone" bit and the ensuing drama, and weaved throughout the movie are other such toe-curling clichés as Dad having unexpected heart-attack, What do you want - "I want the world" and "You cannae go along with things for others' sake, it'll turn out worse in the end. " We even get the shameful sight of police officers joining in with the manic final mass-dance number. By the end, I felt like crying of embarrassment.

The sad thing about Sunshine on Leith is that the one element that may have worked is totally thrown out. After the boys are home, the entire soldier plotline goes out of the window, almost like it never happened, almost like it was pointless. If they had carried on as a post-war story, I think it could have been great. Instead I came out with five definitive words written in my notebook: 'Musically repetitive and dramatically cliché.' I'm sure to those who are entertained by simplicity and phony upbeat, this movie is 'Simply glorious - the feel-fabulous film of the year' (Daily Mail), but as a lover of musicals, solid, original plots and decent movies in general, I was left feeling 'brung-down, run-down, hung-up and all kinds of mean, nasty, ugly things' (Arlo Guthrie).