A Triumph of Tiles over Substance

I wouldn’t consider myself a particularly keen Scrabble player, nor an expert on the game, but there was a point a few years ago when the unruly searchlight in my brain locked onto the game of bag and tiles and I found myself playing hundreds of games over the internet (not quite Scrabble itself, but a copyright-baiting near-clone). I recall one red wine-fuelled face-to-face session which eventually disintegrated into what I can only describe as Scrabugeddon (always agree in advance on what, if any, the time limits on play are going to be, and also how the seating arrangements will be decided), and also Boxing Day 2007, when Mama and I spent about seven hours solid playing in front of a Two Ronnies marathon (at one point I got three bingos on the trot and was nearly disinherited). So, obviously, the lack of genuine Scrabble-based cinema has occasionally been a source of just a tiny amount of angst for me.

And now just such a film has come along, in the form of Carl Hunter’s Sometimes Always Never. I get the impression that the film had the working title Triple Word Score, but I suspect they couldn’t justify the licensing expense, hence a title which is catchy but almost meaningless in this context (apparently it is an old dictum concerning the disposition of a well-dressed chap’s buttons).

In the film we are introduced to Alan (Bill Nighy), who we quickly learn is a slippery and devious fellow, albeit in the most benign and affable-seeming way. As the film opens Alan is meeting up with his son Peter (Sam Riley), as they depart on a rather grave family mission, and the atmosphere is not helped by the obvious tensions between the two men. Peter clearly thinks that Alan’s generally dry and idiosyncratic demeanour has not made him a good father, especially considering that he was a single parent following the death of Peter’s mother.

Their trip turns out to involve a night away, which is a surprise to Peter but not Alan, and their stay in a B&B takes an unexpected turn when Alan starts hustling the other guests at Scrabble for eye-watering sums (old favourites like Muzjiks, Griot and Esrom all make an appearance on the table).  (Jenny Agutter and Tim McInnerny play Alan’s victims in this very funny sequence.)

However, the father-and-son road trip proves fruitless, and Alan and Peter are left to contemplate their relationship, and the others within their family: Peter has a wife (Alice Lowe) and son (Louis Healy), all of whom have impressive Scrabble skills of their own. The irony, of course, proves to be that for all the massive vocabularies the family possess, their actual ability to communicate meaningfully is almost non-existent. Perhaps it was this that drove away Alan’s other son, Michael. But now Alan has found himself playing online Scrabble against someone with an eerily familiar approach to the game. Could it possibly be Michael, trying to get in touch?

The writer of Sometimes Always Never is Frank Cottrell Boyce, who has an eclectic and rather variable CV, if we’re honest: he started his career on the long-defunct soap opera Brookside, went on to various big-screen collaborations with respected directors like Danny Boyle and Michael Winterbottom, wrote a few novels, and won last Christmas’s celebrity University Challenge match between Keble College Oxford and Reading almost single-handed, Reading scoring no points whatsoever. Personally, I find that for every Goodbye Christopher Robin on the list, there is also a Butterfly Kiss; this film is probably towards the top of the pile, for it is amusing and engaging and only occasionally irritatingly mannered and affected.

That said, you are never in any doubt of the fact that you are watching a quirky British film which has clearly been made on a punitively tiny budget. There are various scenes of characters driving back and forth across the north of England, which are mostly realised using obvious back projection, while one plot development which was obviously beyond the reach of the financing is depicted using stop-frame animation. The director works hard to make this look like part of the film’s general quietly off-beat style, but I doubt anybody will be fooled.

I find myself wondering how much of the film’s general tone and identity is the result of an actual creative decision and how much is something necessitated by the lack of money. The setting is mostly suburban, with various scenes in pubs, cafes, kitchens and bedrooms; people sit in cars and caravans as they talk. But there is a lot of talk and not a great deal of the characters actually doing much, unless you include them playing Scrabble with each other. The film has a low-key, deadpan quality which is quite endearing but not especially cinematic – this is one of those films you could watch on the TV without really missing anything. There is nothing especially cinematic about it.

That said, it is still quite watchable, mainly as a result of Nighy’s contribution. To begin with I wasn’t sure about the rather Ringo-esque Scouse drawl he adopts for the role, but it works for the character and I did get used to it. And it is a very funny performance as a man whose apparently laid-back inscrutability masks an implacably ruthless knack for getting whatever he wants. You can tell that deep down Alan is a decent man whose heart is in the right place – but you’re also entirely sympathetic to Peter, who clearly considers him a nightmare to be around.

The problem with the film, if problem it is, is that even the various excavations of the two men’s difficult shared past are so low-key and off-hand that they don’t feel as though they’re carrying much dramatic weight. The film is much more obviously successful when it is trying to be funny than in its more serious moments, which only adds to the sense that this is ultimately something rather lightweight. You can certainly see why Bill Nighy would choose to get involved in this project (he exec produces as well as stars); the film is built around him and it is a brilliant showcase for his talent. And, as noted, the film is often very funny and never less than pleasant to watch. It’s a nice film. The problem is it never feels like it’s more than that, nor even as if it’s really trying to be.

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Pitch Black

I don’t know, you wait years for a movie about violent murder and dog-kidnapping and then two come along in consecutive weeks. That’s about all that Seven Psychopaths and Ben Wheatley’s Sightseers have in common, though: Martin McDonagh’s film drinks deeply of American culture, locations, and attitudes, while Wheatley’s latest offering is intensely, almost painfully English in both its subject matter and its themes.

This is the story of Tina (Alice Lowe), a woman in her 30s still living with her clingy, demanding mother, who blames her for the death of a beloved family pet in a freak charity-related accident a year earlier. But Tina is about the fly the nest, at least temporarily, for she is going on holiday with her new boyfriend Chris (Steve Oram), something which both hope will prove to be an erotic odyssey. An erotic odyssey aboard a 1996 Abbey Cachet caravan, to be more precise, with destinations along the way including Fountains Abbey, the Keswick Pencil Museum and the Ribblehead Viaduct.

Will their adventure allow Tina to conquer her guilt over the death of the dog? Will the two forge a real and lasting relationship together? Or will Chris’s interest in stopping people dropping litter, engaging in class warfare, and doing a little light serial-killing en route get in the way of their burgeoning romance?

‘Show me the world, Chris,’ says Tina near the start of the film. ‘I think we’ll start with Crich Tram Museum,’ Chris replies, and this establishes the tone of Sightseers rather well. There is something peculiarly English about caravanning as a leisure pursuit – this is not one of your giant colonial Recreational Vehicles, but an unwieldy off-white box, inelegant on the outside and cramped within. Chris and Tina’s selected itinerary is similarly eccentric and underwhelming. Eccentric is a good word to describe this film; underwhelming is not.

A lot of attention has been paid to the serial-killing aspect of Sightseers‘ storyline – this is understandable, given it’s largely being advertised on the strength of Wheatley’s record as director of Kill List, and executive producer Edgar Wright’s involvement in Shaun of the Dead. I suspect it’s much easier to sell a horror movie with some comic elements than a very black comedy-drama, which is what I would say Sightseers really is (if my Comparison Wrangler were on duty he’d doubtless describe it as ‘Natural Born Killers directed by Mike Leigh’).

The campaign of bloody slaughter which becomes such an integral part of Chris and Tina’s holiday is not that central to the film, and when it does appear it’s very much in keeping with the tone and style of the rest of it, which is concerned with the minutiae of their relationship.

There is some serious splatter at various points in this film (when Tina complains about Chris smashing a person’s head in with a piece of wood, Chris responds ‘he wasn’t a person, he was a Daily Mail reader’ – so maybe he’s not all bad), but I found this weirdly less uncomfortable to watch than the various human interactions. Tina’s relationship with her mum is squirm-worthy enough, but her romance with Chris is even worse – there’s a cocktail of naivete, desperation, delight and lust going on here which rings horribly true even if much of the writing and acting is done with a broad brush. Bathos and pathos abound and you sense the writer-performers have a degree of sympathy for their characters even while they are forensically exposed to ridicule – there’s a running gag about the caravan rapidly filling up with ghastly tat and Tina’s awful knitted gew-gaws which I particularly liked (although, once again, Tina’s woollen lingerie is probably pushing the joke too far to be credible).

One certainly gets the message that neither of these people was entirely normal even prior to the serial killing becoming an issue – though the film suggests Chris has form in this area, it really looks like this is something they fall into almost naturally as the film goes on. It definitely seemed to me that the murders are there to illustrate the state of the characters’ minds and their relationship, rather than being the central subject of the film per se. If so, this works rather well right up until the end, which to me didn’t quite follow from what had come before – I got a distinct sense of someone thinking ’90 minutes are up, better think of a finish.’

The ferociously banal nature of this sort of holiday is well-evoked and Ben Wheatley comes up with some startling effects in the course of the film – a particularly savage murder is accompanied by a distinguished thesp reading a poem on the soundtrack, for example. The micro-budget nature of the film is never really in doubt but then this suits the story on all sorts of levels.

Sightseers is ultimately an exercise in the presentation of grotesques, and although it does this with great wit, economy, and attention to detail, this still means that it’s quite a hard film to completely engage with. Serial-killing notwithstanding, this is a look at the less magnificent side of obsessiveness – it works as a comedy better than a horror movie, and a character study probably better than either. But it’s fun, funny and original: I enjoyed it a lot.

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