All Or Nothing

Having struck gold with his maudlin London lower middle class drama, Secrets & Lies, Mike Leigh returns to similar territory, this time extending his canvas and heaping even more glumness upon it.  The centerpiece is made up of the Bassett family: Phil (Timothy Spall, back from Secrets & Lies) is the sad-sack paterfamilias, a mini-cab driver given to platitudinous philosophizing and sleeping-in. He lives in a crummy council flat with his wife, Penny (Lesley Manville), a checkout operator at Safeway and their depressed obese children, Rory (James Cordon), currently unemployed and Rachel (Alison Garland), who works in a nursing home.  Also living in the same estate are Carol (Marion Bailey), an alcoholic, and her husband, Ron (Paul Jesson), who is not far behind, and their slutty daughter, Samantha (Sally Hawkins) and Maureen (Ruth Sheen), and her equally slutty daughter (Helen Coker) who is in a deteriorating relationship with her violent boyfriend (Daniel Mays).

No doubt taken on a case-by-case presentation Leigh accurately portrays the soul-destroying dreariness and hopelessness of contemporary English working class estate life but the trouble is that he packs so much of it into the film’s over-long running time that one loses sympathy with characters who largely swing the gamut from “Orright” to “Fuck off” and back again while the hang-dog Phil (it is somewhat unfortunate that his surname is Bassett) winces in quiet desperation as he gropes towards his life-defining crisis.  

For all the structural, thematic and stylistic similarities, Secrets & Lies had a more engaging storyline, one that allowed for a measure of relief or solace from life’s challenges.  All Leigh gives us here is some feeble cheer tacked onto the end of a Sisyphean morass, its very grimness seeming to belie its claim to reality as much as David Lean and Noël Coward's sentimentality did for This Happy Breed.

 

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