"All or Nothing"

Mike Leigh returns to the council flats of London -- and delivers a richly Dickensian masterpiece about working-class family life.

By Charles Taylor

Nov 1, 2002 | Mike Leigh must have the most deceptive style of any filmmaker now working. Like "Secrets and Lies," "Life Is Sweet" or "Meantime" before it, his new movie, "All or Nothing," can easily be mistaken for naturalism. Leigh and his actors are so attuned to the nuances of exchanges between husbands and wives or parents and children, and he can be so unsparing about the everyday cruelties and indignities his characters face, that you feel as if the camera were simply there to record what's going on.

But there's a powerful compassion, and even a sense of hope, at work in Leigh's movies. He never puts his characters under a microscope. The no-hopers who populate the movies of Ken Loach, Britain's premier social-realist filmmaker, finally feel of no interest to the director beyond their ability to advance his political points. Leigh puts the oddities and limitations of his characters right upfront. And yet as strange as they can seem at first, in Leigh's best movies -- and "All or Nothing" is one of his finest -- the people on-screen finally reach us with all barriers obliterated.

In his Village Voice review of "All or Nothing," J. Hoberman calls Leigh the most Dickensian of filmmakers, and I think that's pretty close to the mark. It's not just Leigh's interest in how these people are affected by social institutions; it's his willingness to indulge in caricature (with varying degrees of success) and, I think, the fact that the emotions in Leigh's movies can be overwhelming, the way they are in Dickens.

Leigh made his reputation with TV movies and, with exceptions like "Topsy-Turvy" (a movie I'm nearly alone in thinking a disaster), he has never broadened his scale beyond minutely observed character study. It's the opposite of the sprawl and scale you associate with Dickens. There are moments in Leigh's movies, though, when the emotional impact is so big and so strong that he earns the comparison to Dickens (and in some way I can't pinpoint, to D.W. Griffith, who was Dickens' truest heir in the movies).

The action of "All or Nothing" is set in and around a block of London council flats, a scrubby, ugly place where the residents are trying to find some measure of comfort and grace amid the grind of their lives. The focus of the movie is Phil (Timothy Spall), a minicab driver eking out a miserable living ferrying people around London, and his partner, Penny (Lesley Manville), a supermarket cashier whose mousy demeanor hides the gnawing worry of someone living with the perpetual worry of disaster.

If you've seen Manville as the horrendous yuppie snob of Leigh's "High Hopes" or as the foolish, lovestruck wife of diplomat Kenneth Branagh in Clare Peploe's comedy "High Season," she's almost unrecognizable here. Scrubbed of makeup, with her blunt-cut hair hanging in a utilitarian blob, she defines the word "careworn." Penny's timidity finds its outlet at home when she berates Phil for not making more of an effort at his job, and even more in the tight-lipped resentment of what she doesn't say to him.

Her most painful exchanges, though, are with her son Rory (James Corden), an obese bully who insults his mother at every turn and then, when she upbraids him, claims that he's constantly being picked on. Rory's favorite phrase is "fuck off," and Phil and Penny seem so knocked out by their lives that they suffer his abuse in silence. Rory has shut himself off completely from his family. At the dinner table he sits facing the television.

Phil and Penny also have a daughter, Rachel (Alison Garland), who at first seems inordinately shy or constantly beaten down by life. Watching Garland's exquisite, nearly silent performance, you slowly come to realize that Rachel's reserve, the way she walks through life with her eyes cast down, is a mark of strength and kindness. You see that kindness in her dealings with the residents of the old folks home where she works as a cleaner, or in the way she gives her loose change to Phil when he's scraping the barrel to pay the rental on his minicab. The shot of Rachel tucked up in her bed reading a novel is one of the movie's few images of peace. And it's a measure of how subtly Leigh can achieve his effects, casting this simple, ordinary act as a small oasis of comfort and refuge.

Other characters intersect with Phil and Penny's family, notably Maureen (the wonderful Ruth Sheen), a cashier who works with Penny and lives with her daughter in the same block of flats. Sheen -- she was half of the veteran leftist couple in Leigh's "High Hopes" -- has one of the great faces in the movies: long, with no chin, and seemingly drooping. But Maureen radiates an unfailing common sense and good humor, although not a false cheery humor. She has no illusions about life; her grace comes from her capability to meet it head-on. Sheen acts on the movie like a tonic, dispelling the sense of futility that sometimes threatens to overtake it.

Next Page: Yes, Leigh avoids easy optimism -- but his vision is never hopeless or joyless

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