Sometimes Always Never, review: an oddball gem of Scrabble, sadness and English whimsy
Dir: Carl Hunter. Cast: Bill Nighy, Alice Lowe, Jenny Agutter, Sam Riley, Tim McInnerny, Andrew Shim, Louis Healy, John Westley. 12A cert, 89 min
The novelist and screenwriter Frank Cottrell Boyce has made a quietly heroic contribution to British cinema in the past 20-odd years. He wrote the Jacqueline du Pré biopic Hilary and Jackie (1998), and many of Michael Winterbottom’s films, including several of his best (Welcome to Sarajevo; 24 Hour Party People; A Cock and Bull Story). He’s also collaborated with Danny Boyle, adapting Millions, his own children’s book, into Boyle’s 2004 film, and working on the concept for the opening ceremony at the 2012 London Olympics.
Based on one of his own short stories, Boyce’s new script – which went into production under the title Triple Word Score, but has been released as Sometimes Always Never – is an oddball gem; it lets him double down on a love of eccentric wordplay, while mining a very English seam of gentle melancholy. This tale of a Scrabble-obsessed family is never too pushy: it has a likeably meandering quality, and a warmth that creeps in from scene to scene. Before you know it, you’re captivated by its strange rhythms. And the performances, especially from Bill Nighy and Sam Riley as an estranged father and son trying to pick up the pieces, are full of rumpled nuance.
These two Merseyside men, Alan and Peter, have barely communicated in a decade, ever since Alan’s wife died and Peter’s older brother, unable to cope, disappeared after a row one night. They were in the midst of Scrabble at the time; he objected to his dad’s use of the two-letter word “zo” (a Tibetan cattle breed), a staple of any expert player’s game. While Peter has given up hope of finding him, with a wife (Alice Lowe) and teenage son (Louis Healy) of his own to worry about, Nighy’s Alan, a former tailor, has made a ritual of certain things: playing word games relentlessly on his phone, and going on nightly walks with some vague expectation of solving the mystery.
The early part of the film brings Alan and Peter back together with the morbid purpose of identifying a body, complicated by the fact that a couple they meet (Jenny Agutter and Tim McInnerny), whose own son is missing, have the same duty to perform. At an off-putting seaside hotel, Alan sows the seeds for a Scrabble evening first: before long, words such as “muzjiks” (a pre-Revolutionary Russian peasant) and “griot” (an African historian) are flying down, along with “xi” and “qi”. McInnerny swiftly regrets laying a £200 bet on the side.
Nighy’s faraway demeanour, under a softly persuasive Liverpudlian accent, shines mysteriously both in this excellent scene and throughout. He spares these strangers his own family’s tale, perhaps not wanting to fill them with false hope that the body belongs to someone else. Equally, he tells himself that winning the game means that his own luck will hold in the morning, when the mortuary opens. For the rest of the film, he imposes himself on Peter’s reluctant hospitality; his surly grandson’s bunk bed is the only available berth.
The quirky contours of Boyce’s story are matched, if not excessively italicised, by the directing choices of first-timer Carl Hunter, best known as the bassist for early-Nineties Scouse rockers The Farm. Some of the animated interludes inch towards indie tweeness, but the film’s tone is too singular to be swamped in formulaic whimsy. Despite spots of dead air – even because of them – it somehow sticks with you.
Lowe helps the cause with her reliably nonchalant timing, and it’s always good to see Agutter in a offbeat, unpredictable role. The revelation, however, is Riley, too often miscast. Under his scenes is the resentment of feeling like the non-missing brother, his presence counting less than an absence. It’s a performance that reminds you how thoughtfully natural he can be, capped by a gruffly affecting solo sung on a shingle beach.
In Scrabble, meanwhile, the film sees more than a geeky pastime. This game, in which words score points but their meanings don’t matter, is a funny-sad playground for all these English people, who are failing, in their various ways, to communicate. The hesitancy of the storytelling, with its comforting lulls and odd delays, is a funny sort of boon.
