COMFORTABLE & PREDICTABLE
Nighy plays typical Nighy in cosy film, but gets sidetracked by a busy B-plot
Can an actor possibly be too perfect for a role? That would certainly seem to be the case with Bill Nighy, who naturally underplays his part as a soft-spoken, Scrabble-obsessed tailor grieving a missing son in this quirky family comedy from Britain.
His character, Alan Mellor, is deadpan Nighy as you’ve seen him many times before in The Bookshop, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, About Time, etc. His biggest stretch is to play the part with a somewhere-near-Liverpool accent, a departure from his usual Received Pronunciation.
The film opens with Alan and his not-missing son Peter (Sam Riley) visiting a morgue in a small town, where an unidentified body might be “our Michael.” Stopping at a B&B before the morgue opens in the morning, Alan hustles a married couple (Tim McInnerny, Jenny Agutter) at a game of Scrabble, claiming not to have a very big — you know, lots-of-words thing — then slapping down vocab like muzjiks and hagbut. This alone was enough to endear me to him.
Back home — the body turned out not to be Michael, which is both a relief and a kind of disappointment — Alan’s obsession with triple word scores and two-letter words starts to drive Peter up the wall, even as his wife and son warm to the old man. But then, they didn’t have
to spend their childhoods with Alan as their father, marking everything in the apartment with one of those label-makers, and buying his boys knock-off Lego. This alone was enough to turn me against him.
The film is a hair over 90 minutes, but screenwriter Frank Cottrell Boyce (Goodbye Christopher Robin) tries to shoehorn in an additional subplot with Peter’s son crushing on a girl at school and receiving fashion advice from granddad, including the which-jacket-buttons-to-fasten axiom that gives the movie its title. It complicates the story without adding anything worthwhile.
So if you’re a Nighy fan wanting to see what the septuagenarian is up to next — well, first of all be careful what you wish for, because he has seven projects all due out in the next two years, including the drama Hope Gap, which premièred at the Toronto International Film Festival but hasn’t opened widely yet. Or if you’re a sucker for a certain kind of cosy British storytelling, then step right up. Just don’t expect the unexpected. cknight@postmedia.com twitter.com/chrisknightfilm