Sometimes Always Never
Bill Nighy deadpans his way through Sometimes Always Never. The veteran British actor plays Alan, a father on a mission to find his missing son—but stop! It’s not going to be an action adventure involving car chases and nefarious villains. Here’s a clue of the film’s tone: his missing son wandered off years earlier in the middle of a Scrabble game.
Sometimes Always Never opens on an empty beach where Alan waits alone, standing under an umbrella despite many patches of blue in the partly cloudy Magritte sky. He’s waiting for a rendezvous with his other son, Peter (Sam Riley), who harbors undisguised resentment over the emotional attention lavished on his missing older brother—but stop again! It’s not going to be a conventional father and son drama.
British director Carl Hunter has erected a Wes Anderson world of retro-contemporary artifice around his quirky characters. The setting as Alan and Peter drive to their hotel is anti-realistic, a cardboard car moving against the landscape. The half-empty hotel lounge could have been designed by Edward Hopper. The home Peter shares with his wife Susan and son Jack is candy colored, a human-scale doll’s house with every plate in place.
Language (along with loss and obsession) is a prevailing theme. The banality of several conversations is deliberate and acute. Some background characters never speak when spoken to; the ice cream man on the beach doesn’t respond to Alan’s entreaties for service. Faces on the streets are downcast into cellphones. “Ducks in a row—I don’t mean literal ducks,” Peter tells an obtuse person on the unseen end of a phone call. Despite the many words assembled on Scrabble boards, communication comes hard.
Sometimes Always Never is leavened by flashes of droll English humor aided by the whimsical score by Edwyn Collins (of ‘80s postpunk band Orange Juice). It’s never heavy going, even when streaked with sadness. Alan leaves flyers on windshields—Have You Seen This Boy?—with a faded decades old photo of his lost son. Alan’s quest draws him into the Internet on the hope (“Hope is a great friend,” he says) that the avatar Skinny Thesaurus is his son, reaching out through online games of Scrabble.
Can Sometimes Always Never’s characters overcome their delusion, obsession and bitterness? There is a happy ending but not the one Alan (or the audience) anticipates. Sometimes Always Never is streaming on Amazon.
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