Sometimes Always Never

This is a very very british story about a father and a son, and the difficult relationship between them, tied together through scrabble, sharp suits and general British awkwardness. There’s an entire genre of film I tend to call “Bill Nighy movies” – which don’t even have to feature him (“The Gurnsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society” felt extremely Bill Nighy) – it’s slightly understated, it’s intensely british, it plays to an older demographic and it often doesn’t entirely acknowledge that the UK has undergone most of the second half of the twentieth century, let alone the first two decades of the 21^st (either by being set in period or just not acknowledging any changes in the world since then).  “Sometimes Always Never” has that slightly unstuck-in-time feeling – Bill Nighy’s character is a tailor and his idea of bonding with his grandson is to get him a spiffy suit (even more unlikely, this works and the kid wears it to school on a regular basis with no punchings in the face). And while the plot does feature the internet, mobile phones and various other element of modern society, the visual aesthetic is very much curdled in the experiences of the sixties/seventies. Look, this is a perfectly functional film in many ways, with nice moments of wit and pathos, and particularly the byplay between Nighy and Sam Riley as his son becomes quite touching. But it shows a slightly formaldehyded view of British cinema that makes it very strange.