"All or Nothing"

A lot of the reviews of "All of Nothing," both here and in Britain -- where the film opened a few weeks ago -- have focused on the drabness and dourness of the film, the way Leigh doesn't spare his characters any misery. He doesn't help matters by using a score by Andrew Dickson, heavy on a rather monotonous cello, that underlines the sadness of the characters' lives. The movie doesn't need that kind of emphasis, and Dickson's score makes the film, at times, seem gloomier than it is.

The other major fault here is that some of the supporting characters, particularly Carol, the hopeless drunk played by Marion Bailey, indulge Leigh's taste for caricature without being successful as characters. And surely any working-class London council housing would have blacks, Pakistanis and members of other ethnic groups who aren't visible here.

Leigh does show, however, what he can do with caricature in a scene between Phil and a French passenger (Kathryn Hunter). At first she seems like no more than a cultural stereotype, the snobby, comically arrogant Frog. But Leigh keeps cutting back to this pair finding an unlikely rapport, a few moments when Phil is not just a servant of the people he's driving around but is being noticed and talked to as a human being.

Spall, with his bulk and the face of an enormous basset hound (in fact, Phil's last name is Bassett), is an actor perfectly suited to caricature, as in his performance as the would-be restaurateur in "Life Is Sweet." But he can be a powerfully naturalistic and sympathetic actor as well. He was the only human being in Patrice Chéreau's "Intimacy," a more believable presence that that drab and self-important movie deserved. He does his finest work yet in "All or Nothing."

At times, Spall resembles a reserved Jackie Gleason. As he trudges silently through his job and family life, you may think of Gleason's character, the Poor Soul, a tribute to silent-film comics. There's none of the self-pity and bathos of the sad clown in Spall, however. He's one of those Leigh characters who is genuinely trying to do his best. When that French passenger asks him whether he loves his wife, the husky and hushed yes with which he answers suggests a man who feels things much more strongly and deeply than he can articulate.

Phil may be beaten down but he's not numb. His questions to his family about their day, and the little stories he tells them about his, are his desperate means of connecting. For much of the movie Spall conveys all this with just his huge, sad face. It's in the movie's penultimate scene, however, after disaster has struck the family and Phil lets go of everything he's kept bottled up inside, that the magnitude of Spall's performance becomes evident. Like the miraculous scene in "Life Is Sweet" where Alison Steadman blurts out her love for her daughter Jane Horrocks, and her frustration with the way her daughter has cut herself off, Spall's monologue to Manville's Penny is wrenching. (I watched it through tears.) It's a great, blubbery outpouring of emotion that is also a lifeline thrown to a distant shore. And, mercifully, someone grabs the other end.

Spall's magnificent monologue, and what follows, gives the lie to those who accuse Leigh of unremitting hopelessness -- and to those who have accused him of false optimism. There is a certain kind of bleakness that, no matter how faithfully it sticks to the hard facts of life, is its own kind of lie, a failure of nerve and a failure to imagine that there can be any beauty or tenderness in even the hardest lives. That beauty and tenderness breaks through in "All or Nothing," in Ruth Sheen's face as she sings "Don't It Make My Brown Eyes Blue" at a karaoke night, or in the perfect absurdist touch of Phil visiting a hospital proffering a bunch of bananas as a gift, or in the movie's final scene.

Leigh's daring here is that without once denying the hardscrabble lives of people on the economic fringes of Margaret Thatcher's ruinous legacy, he insists on the importance of those moments when people can connect and express their love for each other. If there's such a thing as life-affirming decency, Mike Leigh has it in bucket loads.

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