Quirky Scrabble drama scores highly
Sometimes Always Never
12A cert, 89 min Dir Carl Hunter Starring Bill Nighy, Alice Lowe, Jenny Agutter, Sam Riley, Tim Mcinnerny, Andrew Shim, Louis Healy, John Westley
The novelist and screenwriter Frank Cottrell Boyce has made a quietly heroic contribution to British cinema in the past 20-odd years. He wrote 1998’s Jacqueline du Pré biopic Hilary and Jackie; and many of Michael Winterbottom’s films, including several of his best; and he’s collaborated with Danny Boyle, first by adapting his own book Millions into Boyle’s 2004 film, and then by working on the concept for 2012’s London Olympics opening ceremony.
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, letting 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 men, Alan and Peter, are Merseyside fellows who 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 mid-scrabble-game 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. 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 smartphone, 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 potentially 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 a seaside hotel, Alan sows the seeds for a Scrabble evening first: before long, words such as muzjiks (a Russian peasant) and griot (an African historian) are flying down, along with xi and qi.
Nighy’s faraway demeanour, under a softly persuasive Liverpudlian accent, shines mysteriously in this excellent scene and throughout. He spares these strangers his own family’s backstory, perhaps not wanting to fill them with false hope that the body is someone else’s. Equally, he tells himself that winning the game means his own luck will hold in the morning, when the mortuary opens. The quirky contours of Boyce’s story are matched 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.
Lowe helps the cause with her reliably nonchalant timing, and it’s always good to see Agutter in an offbeat, unpredictable role. The revelation is the too-often-miscast Riley. Under his scenes are the neglect and 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.
The film, meanwhile, sees something more in Scrabble than just any old 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 failing in their various ways to communicate. The hesitancy of the storytelling, with its comforting lulls and odd delays, is a funny sort of advantage.