Another Year

 On the surface this is a movie about the day to day life of an elderly, happily married couple (Tom and Gerri), their son and friends, among them Mary and Ken. All seems well in suburban London until that very last shot of the film, a most disturbing scene, the climax of the movie.
We see Mary at the kitchen table of her friends and as the conversation passes her by she realizes she doesn't matter to them any more. Worse, we see it dawning on her that she may never have mattered to them at all in their relationship of 20 years. The comparison with her car is inevitable, a vehicle that should have brought her a sense of freedom, but turned out to be a lemon if ever there was one. As another commenter wrote, it is a scene of exceptional cruelty. (Can I nominate Ms Manville for an Oscar, please?)
How could this insincerity, this not-so-mild form of wickedness persist over such a long time ? Perhaps it has something to do with the British fondness of manners, but I think it has to do with work, more specifically in Tom and Gerri's case with having a profession, being a professional.
A professional is someone who is applying a set of rules, an algorithm to a standard input to produce a standard output. (What distinguishes a professional from a craftsman is that the input, rules and output are so complex that they defy supervision.) Tom and Gerri are professionals and what they are doing is extending their professional attitude to their personal lives. Their relationship with Mary is professional. Their marriage is dealt with professionally. Their marital bliss is ultimately based on their contentment with the standardized output it produces. Tomatoes anyone ?
Contrast this with Ken and Mary. Ken is an alcoholic in bad physical shape. He was once handsome however and has a good heart. His problem is that he questions the meaning of his job, which in his case seems to amount to questioning the meaning of his life. And then there is Mary. Her goal in life is Love, not work, thereby committing the ultimate sin (not making work your life goal that is).
Two scenes illustrate the stranglehold work has on our lives (and the importance of it for the movie's theme, I think). In the first an Asian couple is visiting Joe, an old man threatened with eviction and a young woman acting as his interpreter, her ability to help the old man, however, limited to the duration of her lunch break. In the second Carl arrives too late for his mother's funeral, having been stuck in a traffic jam. The funeral couldn't be postponed however, another one was already waiting.
So are Tom and Gerri right ? At the dinner table Tom is telling of how he and Gerri met, by chance on their first day in university. This detail hints at the internal inconsistency of their way of life. And of course right at the beginning of the movie there is this session of Gerri with the sleepless patient, an Everywoman. It shows her utterly failing in her role of counselor, her very profession.
Mary is indeed looking for love in all the wrong places. At the end of the film you realize that, despite all appearances Tom & Gerri's was such a place.

Another Year

 If you are familiar with Mike Leigh's body of works, you'll be familiar with the themes and the setting of this film. In fact, for the first few minutes you might even be thinking "Oh dear... Another Year, another Mike's Leigh's movie". Then slowly this becomes something that somehow stays with you, especially, I suppose, if you are a slightly older person than I am. This is not only a film about relationships, but it's a film about growing old and what relationship mean to a person who's growing old. You've got the old happy perfect couple on one side of the spectrum, the old man who starts his day and ends his day by drinking a can of beer (and obviously has many of them in between), the ageing 40 something woman, who suffers form depression and her to drinks herself to the point of embarrassing herself all the time, you've got the recently widowed man whose life seems to have stop making sense since the death of the wife. Anyway, in other words, this isn't a happy depiction of life: it is after all a Mike's Leigh's film. It's a film about real life, about little moments, silences, gestures, little things. There are so big resolutions, no big twists, not a lot of character development, because after all in life we don't really change much and the biggest twist one may have in his life over the course of one year, is that his or her car might have broken down.
A lot has been made about how Mike Leigh like to shoot his films (rehearsing for 6 months with the actors, letting them improvise and basically writing down the script as he goes along). In this one he ended up dividing his film into 4 season and he gave each of them a different look and feel. Well, to be honest, there's absolutely nothing new or original in that: summer looks shining and warm, winter is obviously grey, foggy and with muted colours, perfectly in keeping with the last chapter which is mainly about death.
The film is pretty slow and yet quite mesmerising. The wonderful performances have a lot to do with the success of this film and I wouldn't be surprise if I ended up seeing some of those names getting some sort of nomination at the Oscars next year (and of course the BAFTA... You know those Brits, are so patriotic).
However I did find some of the dialogue a bit fake and forced (especially the scenes at the dinner table with the new girlfriend). Everybody is always waiting for somebody else to finish their sentence before speaking again during the busiest dialogue scenes. On the other hand, during the slower and more quiet scenes silences and awkward moments are stretched a bit too far. It didn't quite feel right to me.
At the end of the day I couldn't really help feeling that the film is a bit too indulgent in a few places and some of those scenes could have been trimmed a lot more in the editing (I suppose, that's the danger of filming sequences in one very long take: there's probably not a lot of coverage to shorten things with).
Critics have loved it, of course, and I can see why. This is the kind of film that stays with you... But really, in a few years time will we go back to "Another Year" and watch it again? I don't think so.

Secrets and Lies

"Secrets and Lies" is an exquisitely crafted movie, a recognition of the ties that bind us, although we often contest and deny such ties, for myriad reasons. Leigh is an immensely talented director, in control of the many resources at hand and he marshals said resources for compelling ends in this movie.

In this case, the film is, as mentioned, a recognition of the ties which bind and how they are sometimes unseen and, even when recognized, sometimes denied. The story that Leigh tells is that of the Purley family, a family with problems like any other. I hesitate to use the term dysfunctional because it seems the vast majority of families are of this nature and it is rare, the family which is "functional". Indeed, such a family might be somewhat dull to watch during the course of a film because, well, where would the conflict be? In any case, the family which Leigh depicts consists in a man named Mo Purley (the amazing Timothy Spall, who has starred several times for Leigh), a successful photographer who has attained a level of success at which he can now buy a nice house with his somewhat superficial wife Monica (Phyllis Logan). Mo has an older sister named Cynthia (the astonishing Brenda Blethyn) who lives a more banal life. She had a child at a young age and missed out on her education and so works in a factory and seems somewhat obsessed with retaining her youthfulness (and indeed she has remained in good physical shape, even if her looks have worn down, as they might by one's early 40s). Cynthia's daughter Roxanne (Claire Rushbrook) works as a city sweeper and resists her mother's advice on how she might better herself. The two women live together in a small house and are short-tempered with one another much of the time, familiarity and proximity might sometimes induce.

Roxanne seems the most happy with her life although it would not be satisfying for many. She seems happy because she does not, apparently, wish for much more than she has. She is quite happy with her relaxed relationship with a construction worker Paul (Lee Ross) and their routine of watching television and having a couple of pints at the pub many evenings. Her lack of ambition is not to indict those who have goals, but simply to affirm the value of appreciating what one has.

The development which propels the story forward is that a young Afro-Caribbean optometrist, a successful and more composed yin to the Purleys' yang, Hortense (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) decides one day to track down her biological mother. It turns out to be Cynthia, who herself is at her wits' end, discouraged with her dull and monotonous life and with very little self-confidence. Cynthia, however, is a very nice person and is greatly loved by her younger brother for her role in raising him after their mother died when they were children. The relationship between the successful black optometrist and the white factory worker transforms both lives, giving both new appreciation for the wonderful complexity and richness of life.

I must admit that I thought that the revelations in the film were not particularly shocking at first. I thought to myself that I had seen many more jarring and shocking developments before. That said, the acting in this film is second-to-none. Spall, Jean-Baptiste, and Blethyn in particular are exceptional and, although I have seen some critical comments of Frances McDormand for her Oscar-winning performance in "Fargo", I do not think she was undeserving of the award, at least to the degree which some commenters seem to believe. Yes, her performance did not require the emotional range of Blethyn's, or the control of Baptiste's but in enlivening a bland Minnesota police officer, McDormand admirably imagined the cadences and persona of anonymity, and made them compelling. That said, I would not have had a problem with Blethyn winning. Her reaction when it sinks in that the girl she had given up for adoption has found her, is amazing. And the gradual transformation which this revelation has on her life is also amazing, as imagined by Blethyn. In short, Blethyn's performance was Oscar-worthy.

Baptiste is also amazing, embodying, with such restraint, the opposite of the out-of-control lives which burden the Purleys. She is the essence of class and provides a soothing counterpoint to the chaos of the Purleys' lives. And for me, Spall is better than both ladies- which is saying something. One can see the strain that these uneasy relationships are having on him and how he attempts to remain on an even keel amid the tensions and sniping between other family members. He retains this composure until a memorable explosion toward the end of the film. Were he not so composed throughout, the story would have no emotional center. Spall is fantastic.

Leigh's direction is admirable in its restraint. He recognizes that he has a winning story and he elicits measured performances from his actors, building up to the climax of the film without giving up any tension along the way. The metaphor of Mo's photography and his ability to elicit appropriate reactions from family members with obviously conflicting agendas and attitudes is representative of his abilities to steer the feelings of family members away from the harmful, hurtful reactions which they all wish to unleash on one another. He captures snapshots of groups as they wish to be captured. However, the mode in which they are photographed usually does not reflect their actual feelings at the time, and indeed may obscure peoples' true feelings about being there, in those circumstances, with those people.

In short, this film captures persuasively the degree to which we hide our feelings from one another and how revelation might be better for our mental health and may not actually harm us as much as enable us to come to terms with ourselves.

All or Nothing

Lets be honest, Mike Leigh's films are not for everyone. No effort is made to make them commercially viable, the cast are almost always, largely unknown and certain scenes are so harrowing that even the strongest viewer can find themselves distressed and perturbed. While these factors keep some people away, they also keep many others coming back time and time again. Mike Leigh is quite simply, a national treasure. And I don't mean that in the same fluffy "Gawd Bless 'Em" manner that people applied to Thora Hird and the Queen Mother. I mean that he is simply one of the finest and most honest chroniclers of contemporary Britain that we have produced.

Make no mistake, the British have always enjoyed social realism. We can gauge that through that great yardstick of social self-perceptions, the soap opera. While the Americans produce soaps full of tanned, successful oil barons and their supermodel / actress mistresses, and the Australians show us their blue collar bungalow owners who like a beer with their mates and a barbecue on Sundays, the British make soaps full of characters who are little more than diluted, softened incarnations of Leigh's own subjects. People who work at checkouts and in launderettes, people who are trapped by poverty, alcoholism, violence and stifled or strangled ambition.

But through it all , there's a hope, an anticipation of a better day just around the corner and that's what makes these films ultimately uplifting. Leigh has always shown that no matter how dire the circumstances, how forlorn the existence, love and hope, friendship and family, will find a way to offer support, comfort and succor.

In achieving this, Leigh has the assistance of another of the U.K.'s finest - Timothy Spall. If ever an actor was capable of portraying at once the fragility, insecurity and yet the potential for sheer stubborn strength of the British psyche its Spall. His character in All or Nothing, Phil is an incredibly vulnerable man. A pensive, gentle man, trapped in his own doubts and in a world of people who react by lashing out, verbally or physically and so compounding his doubts and fear. He apologises constantly, and often appears to be apologising for simply existing. An under-educated but intellectual man he even apologises for having an extensive vocabulary, a character trait which Leigh uses cleverly but subtly by having Phil precede each "big word" with "wotsitsname". It appears that Phil is searching for the word, he isn't, he knows exactly what he's about to say but is reluctant to say it in case he appears educated or articulate. We hear Phil talk about destiny and saying "It's...wotsitsname..kismet". In a world of expletives and harsh words he's ashamed at his verbal dexterity viewing it as a weakness rather than a strength.

Devices such as these help us understand technically why Leigh is just such a good writer and the way in which these devices are performed help us understand why Leigh constantly looks to Spall to anchor his scripts with his marvelous humanity.

All or Nothing is a vicious, gut wrenching, graceful, uplifting gem of a movie from a master filmmaker. Its is performed by a marvelous leading man and a collection of wonderfully talented supporting actors. In a world of blockbusters and multi million dollar opening nights Mike Leigh continues to give us humanity, despair, courage and beauty. And do we ever need him.