Nighy shines in British ‘Sometimes Always Never’
Yes,
Day.”
Let’s get that out of the way up front. “Palm Springs” is a romantic comedy about reliving the same day over and over, despite the protagonist’s best efforts to break the cycle. Nothing new under the sun, as they say.
But a fresh take is still possible, and Max Barbakow’s film provides one. You can’t reinvent
it sounds
like the plot of “Groundhog the wheel, but you can make it roll in a quirky way. That’s what Barbakow does with “Palm Springs,” which is streaming on Hulu. It’s dark, nihilistic, funny and ultimately sweet and hopeful, and thus so inadvertently perfect for people stuck at home practicing pandemic avoidance that you kind of have to love it a little.
‘Palm Springs’
Max Barbakow.
It is difficult, maybe even impossible not to be charmed by Bill Nighy, and his expert performance of a morose Scrabble player with a Liverpudlian accent in “Sometimes Always Never” does not challenge this assertion.
“Sometimes Always Never” is director Carl Hunter’s first feature length film, and the screenplay by Frank Cottrell-Boyce (“Millions”) provides rich, if
‘Sometimes Always Never’
Bill Nighy, Sam Riley, Alice Lowe, Louis Healy, Jenny Agutter, Tim McInnerny
PG-13 for thematic elements and some sexual references.
Great
Fair
Carl Hunter
Available on Video on Demand.
Bad
Good
Bomb
at times slow-moving, lugubrious fodder for a witty and emotional family journey. It also serves as a vocabulary lesson, and may teach you some highscoring words to play in your next foray into a lettered tile game.
The film is available on video on demand.
Nighy shines in this relatable, yet quintessentially English story
The film opens on a deadpan shot of Alan (Nighy) on the phone with his son Peter (Sam Riley), his silhouette blending in with artist Antony Gormley’s self-referential life-size cast-iron sculptures on Crosby Beach near Liverpool. They meet up to take a road trip to potentially identify a long-lost family member — Alan’s son and Peter’s brother Michael has been missing for years after storming out during a contentious game of Scrabble, and the police found a body matching his description.
The body is not Michael’s, but from there the disconcertingly quiet family drama unfolds as it has for decades, with Alan, a widower, wordsmith and former tailor, chasing the ghost of a son who has likely stayed lost all of these years for a reason. Peter wants to shed the weight of the disappearance of his older brother, the missing Prodigal Son, but can only do so if he finds a way to connect with his father, who has been lost in a fog of the unknown for years.
“Sometimes Always Never” relies on the Wes Anderson aesthetic — whimsical, colorful deadpan tableaus of stoic people and quaint objects. The use of retro wallpaper patterns, saturated jewel-tones and bursts of animation for scene transitions can seem derivative, but is still visually appealing.
Despite the slow pace, the subtle, stirring performances by the entire cast, specifically Nighy, Riley, and a small-yet-delightful role played by Jenny Agutter, create a peculiar, compelling story that is difficult to look away from even if the destination is fairly obvious.
The story, which is billed as something of a mystery, lacks a certain amount of tension in that respect, as it is clear from the get-go that the “mystery” of the missing son is not one that will likely have a tidy resolution.
On the surface, this strange film could leave you thinking that not much actually happened during its 91-minute runtime, but it’s the idiosyncratic emotional journey, expertly portrayed by Nighy and the ensemble, rather than the destination that sticks with you.