Irish director Niall Heery follows his 2006 film Small Engine Room with this offbeat dramedy about a family reluctantly brought together after many years. David Wilmot is fantastic if hardly surprising casting as Ray, a loveable loser with a history of depression. Returning home to care for his ailing father, he reconnects with first love Alice (Kerry Condon), and Abbie (Maisie Williams, from Game of Thrones), the daughter he never knew. His plans for a Happily Ever After are scuppered when he discovers Alice has married their old PE teacher Frank (James Nesbitt), an arrogant and self-deluded cheeseball determined to be the Next Big Thing in “high performance coaching”.
There’s a comforting familiarity to Gold’s innocently bittersweet tale, anchored in Ray’s emotional journey. Though his past suicide attempt is used as a way of condescending to him, Ray’s experiences have left him sure of his priorities; he wants to love and support his family as best he can. The other characters, though seemingly self-assured, are the ones floundering. From Frank’s obsession with winning, to Alice’s willingness to settle for safety over passion, to Abbie’s adolescent insecurity, Ray slowly becomes the clumsy but emotionally honest foil to their uncertainty.
However,Gold’s tone veers from subtle, witty sensitivity to clichéd melodrama in a millisecond, and the characters can become inconsistent caricatures. Maisie Williams is strong, but Abbie is full of jarring contradictions; sarcastic, smart and self-possessed, the unquestioning admiration she has for Frank’s cartoonish absurdity never feels believable.
There’s a nice visual juxtaposition between the modest, damply grey settings and Frank’s hilariously self-important videos. Nonetheless, Heery relies too much on his overbearing, comically pitched score to set the tone.
A warm but middling endeavour.