|
Mike
Leigh, is clearly political—a man of the left and Thatcher-hater who viewed the
"reactionary" Tory governments as helping to destroy the fabric of
English society. However, he does not use his films as vehicles to promote a
political position. They carry no political agendas nor do they offer political
alternatives or solutions as does Ken Loach (Bread and Roses). Leigh does not share Loach's independent Marxist
vision that the world divides roughly between those who hold power and those
who are its victims,
and that the possibility for radical social change still lies with the working
class.
Leigh's latest film, All or Nothing, focuses on contemporary
working class life on a grim council estate in Southeast London. The film is in some ways reminiscent of Leigh's
melancholy and blackly comic portrait of the dysfunctional, unemployed working
class family in Meantime (1983), but
this made for television film is
without the latter's leavening of humor.
All or Nothing centers on the quietly desperate lives of a minicab
driver Phil Bassett, and his common-law wife Penny (played by Leigh regulars,
Tim Spall and Leslie Manville); their two children, and their neighbors. Phil
is a gentle, solitary, philosophical man who has the hangdog look of someone
thoroughly beaten by life. He drives his cab through the night for just enough
money to keep the family together, and sleeps days too depressed and lethargic to
get up on time for the more lucrative airport runs. Penny is neat and
competent, and works at a mind-numbing job as a cashier in a supermarket. She
is the only ordinary-sized, attractive member of the family, though she
constantly looks beleaguered—her pertness worn down by years of frustration and
disappointment. It's a sense of unhappiness that she never articulates, except
through picking on Phil. And she has lost all interest in Phil, who loves her
deeply. Penny is repelled by his touch, they barely speak, and she won't even
take an evening walk with him.
The two children, like their
father, are grossly overweight. Sensitive, withdrawn, book-reading Rachel
(Alison Garland) works at a job far below her potential as a cleaner in a
nursing home, where her only human connection is a pathetic fellow cleaner—a
lonely old man who feebly propositions her. Her brother, angry unemployed Rory
(James Corden) spends his days picking fights on the estate grounds, and
snarling curses at his mother while lying on a couch watching television.
Leigh frames the Bassetts in
penetrating close-ups that say more than any dialogue could about the anguish
they live with. Spall gives a quietly searing performance as a seeing man at
the end of his tether, whose life has been bound by failure (though his
relationship to daughter Rachel is an unspoken but loving one). Lost in his own
angst, an unshaven sweaty Phil silently drives a melange of passengers—drunks,
an old man visiting a cemetery, and teenage girls talking about getting rings
for their nipples. The quick cuts of the passengers artfully provides a
striking evocation of the human condition.
Many of Leigh's films—Secrets and Lies, Life is Sweet and High
Hopes—end with an affirmation of affection between family members. All or
Nothing does this as well, but it is, for the most part, so disconsolate a work
that nothing prepares us for the almost miraculous transformation in the
family's relationship in the film's climax. These happy moments in Leigh's
world are never the whole story, but still, there is something too schematic
about this ending, as if Leigh wants to wipe away his powerful, unrelenting
vision of people leading unhappy
lives—the type of despair that would take a good deal more than one night of
intimacy to redeem.
In All or Nothing Leigh fully displays his extraordinary talent for
creating characters who are too complex and idiosyncratic to be seen as social
types. In his best work, his characters are so individuated that, like people
in the real world, their emotions are too changeable to be easily fixed. In one
remarkable sequence, for example, Leigh sums up Phil's emotional state: the cab
driver shuts off his cell phoneócutting off all contact with the outside
worldóand heads for the ocean. These are unusually bold acts for a man who
usually passively endures his oppressive life. At the ocean he stands in an
isolated spot, amidst tall weeds waving in the wind, staring out into space.
The look on this inarticulate unskilled man's face is of someone without any
recourse or hopeóa totally bereft figure alone in a universe that offers him no
solace. This is the most powerful moment in the film, captured entirely
visually, without dialogue.
All or Nothing's emphasis is not on poverty or unemployment but on
human separateness. Leigh is much more interested in his characters'
existential condition—their potential to connect or love—than in the social and
class context that shapes and constricts them. Hope rests in the world of this
film not with social or economic change, but in mother love and, most
importantly, the reconnection of husband and wife.
The fact that the
social-cultural context shapes and limits people's lives is only one of the
levels that Leigh’s films work on. In addition, if his characters are sometimes
victims of a hierarchic and exploitative society, Leigh never brushes over or
justifies their capacity to behave badly or victimize others. Being a social
victim does not make one more humane or virtuous, and no social class is immune
from criticism in his films. However, it’s often his upper and
upper-middle-class characters he savagely parodies, and itís his working class
characters, even the most repellent, whom he makes most complex and extends his
deepest sympathies to.
Starting with Bleak Moments in 1972 Leigh's films have been in the general
tradition of English realism, which has been one of the dominant strains in
British cinema. Its beginnings can be found in the social documentary cinema of
the 1930s, whose leading figure was John Grierson. This movement sought to
create responsible cinema that would be distinct from class-bound, escapist,
commercial films. The heirs to this tradition were the humanist Free Cinema
films of the 1950s. The key figures in the Free Cinema movement moved from
documentaries to feature films that attempted to focus without condescension on
working-class characters, locales, and concerns. All the directors though were
upper-middle-class and Oxbridge-educated, making films about lives that they
saw from the outside, that had little or nothing to do with their own.
These English New Wave films
explored the desires and hopes of their working-class protagonists and their
ambivalent relationship to working-class culture, rather than examining social
or economic structures. The films centered on men and women who felt their soul
and spirit threatened by a set of social and cultural forces. Their credo was
best summed up in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning's (1960)Arthur Seaton's terse,
rebellious line, "don't let the bastards grind you down."
Leigh's films owed more to the
work of independent American directors like John Cassavetes and Robert Altman
than to the New Wave. Cassavetes' Shadows
inspired Leigh when he first saw it. The film shares with his own work a minimal
narrative, low budget, ensemble cast, and a behaviorally oriented,
improvisatory quality. However, Leigh never saw Cassavetes as an influence, for
he found some of his work "tedious—limited to the actors, really—spewing
it out—which is the antithesis of what I've been concerned with—getting the
essence of the real world." With Altman, Leigh shares a gift
for mixing the poignant and the farcical (though with greater psychological
depth), and linking it to a critique of the workings of society and culture.
Though Altman, being rooted in American culture—a society that barely
recognizes the existence of classóhas demonstrated little or no interest in
dealing with the nature of class culture and power (until Gosford Park).
In most of his films Leigh
captures the emotional drives of his characters as well as their speech
patterns and tastes, and he usually satirizes them a bit while simultaneously
respecting their feelings and selfhood. It's a delicate line that Leigh draws,
and more often than not balances with great agility. Sometimes the films get
bogged down in over-the-top behavior (Leigh was a skilled enough cartoonist to
make a living at it) which reduces his characters to their class stereotypes.
Only then does their class culture become the prime definition of their
identity. But it is something Leigh tries hard to avoid.
Critics often lump Leigh and Ken
Loach together, because they are independent, non-commercial directors, who
spent much of their careers working on television, and share a love for making
realistic films about working class characters. But their ways of dealing with
politics and their formal strategies differ radically. According to Leigh,
Loach would regard him politically "as, at best, a lily-livered
liberal." Leigh's films rarely provide answers, while Loach permeates his
work with a class-conscious, radical social agenda.
In All or Nothing Leigh constructs a level of relationships and
singularity of character that few other contemporary directors are able to
approach. It's hard to think of another director who can grant characters like
the Bassetts such unsentimental and intricate life. In this film, for the most part, Mike Leigh has achieved
what he has done so often in his work. He has granted tragic depth and a rich
emotional texture to the lives of his modest characters, with an eye and ear
that keenly records how the most ordinary people attempt to make sense of their
lives.
A
portion of this review appeared in Cineaste,
Vol.XXVIII, No.1, winter 2002, pp.38-40.
 |
|
|
 |
|
