Brooding, Arguing, and Boozing
Written: Dec 15 '05
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Brilliant character portrayals, strong performances, excellent cinematography and score
Cons: Lesser characters abandoned; hopeful ending not convincing enough to offset two hours of relentless despair
The Bottom Line: This award-winning film by Mike Leigh is masterfully constructed but ultimately suffers from far too many unattractive characters.
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| metalluk's Full Review: All or Nothing |
My next two film reviews will feature the same director, Mike Leigh. Having previously very much enjoyed his film Secrets and Lies (1995), I've decided to expand my familiarity with his work with two of his more recent award-winning films. For the present film, All or Nothing (2002), I find myself in the awkward position of wanting to heap praise on a film that I didn't truly enjoy watching. It's a brilliant piece of filmmaking about characters that, in real life, I would go out of my way to avoid. Among the thirteen main characters in this film, at least nine are more annoyingly neurotic than anyone I have to deal with in daily living. Their lives are miserable because of both their circumstances and their own self-destructive personalities.
Historical Background: Mike Leigh is arguably the leading English filmmaker and cinematic poet, presently, although his unique style doesn't especially lend itself to major commercial success. Leigh was born in Salford, England in 1943. After graduating from film school, Leigh began working in theater, where he honed his unusual style of directing, which consists of a collaborative and improvisational process with his actors. Leigh stuck with that method when be turned to filmmaking in 1971 with Bleak Moments, which won prizes at film festivals in Chicago and Locarno. Nevertheless, Leigh found it impossible to acquire funding for feature films, so he turned for most of the next decade to work in television and the theater. His television movies during the eighties included Meantime (1983) and Four Days in July (1984). His next feature film for the big screen was High Hopes (1988), which screened at the New York Film Festival and garnered Leigh some much deserved public attention. Life Is Sweet (1991) and Naked (1993) further enhanced his reputation for innovation.
Leigh's next film, Secrets and Lies (1995), took the Palme d'Or at Cannes and solidified Leigh's international reputation. It also earned a Best Actress award for Brenda Blethyn. Secrets & Lies also received Oscar nominations for Best Picture, Best Actress (Blethyn), Best Supporting Actress (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), Best Director and Best Original Screenplay, though taking none of the trophies. Between that success and the present film, Leigh made Career Girls (1997) and Topsy Turvy (1999). Although Leigh's early films developed political themes, his more recent work has veered in the direction of psychological and existential issues. Leigh's films are character driven more than plot driven, which is a natural consequence of his collaborative method. With the exception of the atypical Topsy Turvy, Leigh emphasizes characters from the working and middle classes. Leigh's great strength as a director is his ability to draw superlative performances from his actors.
The Story: The story centers on three working class families who live in a housing project in South London. One family of four, the Bassetts, includes Phil (Timothy Spall), a depressed cab driver with a hangdog face, who philosophically bears the annoyances thrown at him by the various bizarre characters that occupy the backseat of his cab at one time or another. Phil lives with his common-law wife, Penny (Lesley Manville). They've been together for more than twenty years, but they've reached a stage where they merely tolerate one another. They can barely survive from day to day on Phil's wages as a cabdriver and Penny's as a cashier at a supermarket. Penny's emotional energy goes primarily into coping with her obese, angry, and slovenly son Rory (James Corden), whose chief occupations are lounging on the couch and kicking around a soccer ball. Rory's sister, Rachel (Alison Garland), is also obese but of a quieter, depressive disposition. Rachel works in a nursing home, cleaning up feces and making beds. One lonely old man, Sid (Sam Kelly), engages in a gentle if not very subtle effort to seduce Rachel, who is almost lonely enough to contemplate the idea. The Bassett family dynamic is that Penny and Rory provide the fireworks in the form of constant bickering while Phil and Rachel sulk about, passively and dejectedly.
Also living in the same housing project is Maureen (Ruth Sheen), a single mother with a cranky and rebellious teenage daughter, Donna (Helen Coker). Donna's face is typically twisted up into a scowl. Donna has an abusive, hotheaded, and insensitive boyfriend, Jason (Daniel Mays), with a long scar down one side of his face. When Donna gets pregnant, despite taking birth control pills (on weekends!), Jason is furious, accusing Donna of hoping to entrap him. Maureen is the film's most psychologically robust character, maintaining both composure and a supportive demeanor, despite her daughter's negativity and problems.
The third family is comprised of Carol (Marion Bailey), Ron (Paul Jesson), and their teenage daughter Samantha (Sally Hawkins). Carol and Ron are both alcoholics. Samantha is understandably disgusted with them. She's also a horny teenager who would like to steal Jason from Donna or, barring that, seduce the rather peculiar Craig (Ben Crompton), who lurks about in the shadows and later carves an "S" on his shoulder with a knife when he falls in love with Samantha.
The three families are interconnected because the three mothers, Penny, Maureen, and Carol, are friends who help one another out and occasionally share a night out together at a nightclub. Ron and Phil are also friends and co-workers as cabbies for the same employer, Neville (Gary McDonald). Phil helps Ron out when he breaks a taillight on his taxi and Ron later drives Phil's wife to the hospital during a crisis.
There are really only two plot developments in this 128 minute film: Donna revealing that she's pregnant, first to Jason and later to her mother, and a medical emergency involving one of the Bassetts. I won't say which one or how it turns out since that event is really the only surprise that the film has to offer. Mostly, viewers are invited to share a few days in the lives of these despondent and troubled people and to enjoy Mike Leigh's subtle observations about the nature of these characters.
Themes: One implicit theme of this film is the emptiness in the lives of many working class people, particularly those who are struggling from day to day just to make ends meet. Phil sums the notion up with an observation that people work all day, sleep and night, and then die. Phil is a bit of an uneducated philosopher with a vocabulary that he's actually embarrassed to disclose, pretending that he's fumbling for colorful words like "fate" or "kismet" that he actually knows full well. He has a knack for dismissing misfortunes by suggesting that something worse might have happened had the lesser travail not transpired.
The more explicit theme of the film is the idea that positive elements remain available in life, regardless of financial circumstances: love and family support. For most of the film, the characters whose lives we share compound their difficult lot in life by constantly bickering and abusing one another. The verbal exchanges between the characters are constantly laced with abusive dialog. The phrase "fuck off," for example, is liberally sprinkled throughout the film. It takes a family crisis to motivate the Bassetts to pull together for a change.
Production Values: The film's script was basically cobbled together by the collaborative and improvisational process for which Mike Leigh is famous. The result is a richness of characters that one seldom encounters in film but also a bit of incoherency in the overall narrative design. Not only does precious little happen by way of plot, many of the characters are merely developed but never pursued through any kind of process or resolution. The last segment of the film provides a bit of a positive development for the Bassetts, creating a sense of hope to balance all of the despair, but the other two families are simply abandoned and forgotten. Furthermore, the apparent progress made by the Bassett family is really not all that convincing. One can easily imagine them reverting to their usual dysfunctional status as soon as the immediate crisis has passed. Adverse habits don't typically change that readily. There's a reason that few great art works are collaborative efforts. Usually the vision of a single artist, unfettered by competing ideas, leads to the most inspired results. Nevertheless, Mike Leigh's approach is unique and gives us another kind of artistic process to experience, with its distinctive strengths and weaknesses.
The characterizations in this film are of an exceptionally high quality, providing a level of nuance and vividness that we seldom see in films. That is Leigh's strength as a director. The quality of the characters derives from the collaborative process. The actors truly invent the characters and live their characters, ensuring a motivational consistency and detail that would be nearly impossible by conventional methods. Then, Leigh ensures that viewers are able to observe these characters with a dispassionate eye by avoiding both sentimentality and mockery.
Leigh's title for this film, "All or Nothing," certainly begs for an ironic interpretation. None of the characters in this film enjoy anything remotely close to "all" that life has to offer their more privileged brethren. Their lives seem to exist on the cusp between nothing and just a bit more than nothing.
Dick Pope provides the cinematography for the film. The framing is consistently effective and the shot distance and angles nicely varied. There's an interesting lighting effect by which the brightness of the frames increases during the hopeful denouement. Pope provides subtler than typical establishing shots for each new scene, respecting the viewer's intelligence and patience in determining the nature of the setting. The soundtrack, provided by Andrew Dickson, is deeply melancholic, consistent with the subject matter.
The performances are outstanding, most especially that of Timothy Spall, with his dour-faced loneliness and resignation. Spall has been a regular in Leigh's films, including Life is Sweet (1991), Secrets and Lies (1995), and Topsy-Turvy (1999). He's also worked in Chicken Run (2000), Vanilla Sky (2001), The Last Samurai (2003), and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azakaban (2004). Lesley Manville is vulnerable and martyred as Penny. Her other work has included High Hopes (1988), Secrets and Lies (1995), and Topsy-Turvy (1999). I was impressed with Ruth Sheen, though that might be partly due to her character being the one I most liked. She previously appeared in High Hopes (1988). The two younger actresses were quite effective: Helen Coker and Sally Hawkins. In general, the performances in this film feel so real that the actors and actresses virtually disappear.
Bottom-Line: I've got to be honest here. This is a film that I respect far more than I enjoyed. It's high quality filmmaking and at one level deserves a better rating than I'm going to give it. I just didn't enjoy spending time with this slew of dysfunctional and self-defeating individuals. I hope that doesn't make me an elitist. I don't imagine myself any better than the people depicted in this film because human worth is not defined by the skills a person does or does not possess. I only say that these people reside on a plane of existence that I prefer not to frequent. This is a brilliantly insightful film by a master filmmaker, with strong characters, but a vicious, uncompromising view of human life overwhelmed by neurosis and despair. The little glimmer of hope at the film's end just isn't convincing enough for me to balance the grueling emptiness of the lives depicted.
Recommended:
No
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