Sometimes Always Never
It is odd that Bill Nighy has given his most natural and greatest performance in a gentle film like Carl Hunter’s Scrabble-loving debut “Sometimes Always Never,” but then, these are strange times. They were strange in 2018 when the British production premiered at the London Film Festival based on a screenplay by celebrated screenwriter Frank Cottrell Boyce (“24 Hour Party People,” “Millions,” “Goodbye Christopher Robin”). They will still be strange in July, after its U.S. run in “virtual cinemas,” when it bows on VOD. And they were certainly strange in the alternate, anachronistic present-day England of the film.
As widowed father, grandfather, bespoke tailor and Scrabble hustler Alan, Nighy gives us his softest Liverpudlian lilt yet and also combines his usual rakishness (slightly less easy here), dapper style (stiffly diffident Englishness donned even more self-consciously) and comic timing (drier than ever). You see, Michael Alan’s son who stormed out of the house during an argument over whether zo (a Tibetan yak/cow crossbreed) is a valid word or not and never came back has been missing for many years.
Alan’s search for Michael has meant he left Peter alone Peter (Sam Riley), who stayed with Alan and now is married to Sue (Alice Lowe) and father to high-school-aged Jack (Louis Healy). So while Alan does have many cheeky life lessons to bestow upon us about Marmite or snappy dressing or knowing all the two-letter words officially accepted by the Scrabble dictionary most of them land on Jack, because Peter is several hundred emotional li away from him.
But before we know any of this basic yet emotionally resonant stuff out before we know how much to care about whether a father and son who live in the same house will ever be able to talk again there’s another element introduced by Hunter, which is the film’s persistently quirky visual style, and which pretty much amounts to another character.
Girls in ’60s headbands and sherbet-colored coats chat over the handlebars of their classic mopeds. Hallways are painted aggressive shades of grandma pink. Anecdotes come with split screens or cutesy animations or scratchy black-and-white flashbacks. And car journeys are ostentatiously bleached-and-curled views from 1970s postcards left to bake in the sun. Hm.
Anyway, Peter and Alan have a reunion of sorts when they go together to see if a body that sounds like Michael has been found it has, they get trapped overnight in a little hotel together where they meet Margaret (Jenny Agutter) and Arthur (Tim McInnerney), who are also the parents of a lost son, and have come to town to look at the same body; they play Scrabble with Alan, who amusingly pretends not to know anything about the game only then to drop words like muzjiks (indentured peasants in Russia) thereby gazumping Arthur for £200; so afterwards (because it isn’t Michael’s body), when he gets home again, Alan foists himself on Peter’s family even more inarticulately reparative than before only this time convinced that an online Scrabble adversary is his long-lost son.
Richard Stoddard’s photography features a saturated palette, canted angles and tilt-shifted toytown effects. This only serves to reinforce the archly indie art direction (think of a slightly slovenly Wes Anderson or a slightly spruced-up Aki Kaurismaki). Edwyn Collins and Sean Read provide the quaintly plinky score. It’s not that it’s unpleasant in its inference that these characters are trapped in the past; it just has some nicely inventive flourishes, and could be accused of stating the obvious. But then again, this isn’t really a film about grief, loss or disruptions in qi (the Chinese word for life force), even if they do feature heavily throughout both script and performance.
This is thanks to Riley, Nighy, Lowe and Agutter all finding a truthful, moving place to work from although it doesn’t help that there isn’t a single scene here where someone isn’t at risk of being upstaged by an elaborately crafted Venetian mask or an eye-jangling turquoise and pink colour scheme. Their quiet performances cut through such noisy visual style so well that though the plot’s pacing may be outmatched by the average aim (a three-toed South American sloth), we remain engaged.
“You think it’s going to be about the words but really it’s about the numbers,” says Peter which is quite possibly the truest statement anyone has ever made about Scrabble on film and illustrates another great pleasure of Cottrell Boyce’s script: It really gets Scrabble. And there is something to be said for logophilia as comfort; for wordplay; for precise rules that can be coolly comprehended; for how much Alan understands that outside this gameboard none of those things will hold true; for how painfully aware he is of what lies beyond its calming, colourful grid.
That “Sometimes Always Never” can teem with such unnecessary whimsy and so many underdeveloped side ideas and yet do (a mystical universal force theorized to be responsible for invisible phenomena such as magnetism) still hold together through the power of strong performances, heartfelt offbeatness, insightfulness and Scrabble-happy scripting is strange indeed. Or perhaps not so much strange as do.
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