Sheen is on fine form as he upstages an array of silly haircuts in a festive heartwarmer that hits all the right notes
Is there name yet for the genre of stories in which a character goes through multiple realities, made magically accessible without any proper science-fiction explanation, in order to learn some kind of life lesson? Let’s call them mystical multiverse tales. It’s a particularly popular plot mechanism in movies these days, although you can trace it back to Charles Dickens’ A
Christmas Carol and then on through Frank Capra’s film It’s a Wonderful Life, Groundhog Day, Sliding Doors and beyond.
This
British comedy-drama is squarely embedded in the mystical multiverse tradition, with its flawed but essentially likable central character – in this case Michael Sheen’s Nottingham-bred wideboy Tony Towers, who discovers one Christmas Eve that he can experience the forking paths his life might have taken by shifting from one carriage to another on a homeward-bound train. The story starts in 1985, when Tony is a fortysomething nightclub owner with a massive Peter Stringfellow-style blond mullet. He’s accompanied on the trip back to see his elderly parents by his nice girlfriend Sue (Nathalie Emmanuel) and his younger brother Roger (Cary Elwes under serious ginger wigs), who is less successful than Tony but is at least happily married to Astrid (Anna Lundberg).