Slovenly despair
Personally, I find a little quiet desperation goes a long way, but evidently Mike Leigh feels differently, so here he is, after the welcome diversion into Gilbert and Sullivan for Topsy limy, once more prowling the concrete walkways of some grim council estate in London SE10. The r..awfulness of this corner of our sceptred isle is, as always, lovingly rendered — you can almost smell the urine in the lifts — but it feels less like a slice of British life, however limited, and more a conscious retreat from it, to a lurid backwater, a playground for Leigh's very limited interests.
This time round, Timothy Spa11 plays a minicab driver called Phil Bassett, hangdog by name, hangdog by nature. He has a common-law wife, Penny, played by lovely Lesley Manville who works so hard at looking drab enough for Mike Leigh. Penny works at Safeway on the cash register. They have two fat hopeless kids — a surly resentful foul-mouthed son who sprawls on the couch all day, and a doormat daughter who's got a cleaning job at an old-folks' home. There's also Phil's fellow cabbie Ron, and Ron's lush of a missus Carol, and various other characters from whom the colour seems to have been remorselessly drained. An oppressive listlessness quickly settles over the picture: however run down the housing estate is, its occupants are more so.
By now, you realise All Or Nothing is a con title. It's not a choice between all or nothing, there's no possibility of all, just the certainty of nothing, day after day till death puts them out of their misery. As everyone knows, Mike Leigh develops his films through an improvisation process with the cast, in which actors describe real people they've known, concoct situations in which to place them, and eventually create characters that are just like all the other Mike Leigh characters in all the other Mike Leigh films. I can't see the point of it myself and the slim benefit it brings in the telling detail, conversational or behavioural, is at the expense of bigger themes, deeper characters and a wider range. In the end, the famous process seems to have stunted Leigh's development. His fans feel differently: he's an acquired taste and, once you've acquired it. any criticism is by the by. Personally, I can't stand Abigail's Party: it's not just that he condescends to his characters — he wouldn't be the first film-maker to do that — but that the condescension is the point of the exercise. That may he a natural consequence of allowing your dramatis personae to be vamped up from acting-class exercises, but it's one reason why Leigh brought out the worst in Alison Steadman, so good with other directors.
That's perhaps the only real advance over the last 30 years: Leigh has gradually learned to rein in the patronising. Spa11 and Manville manage to convey a touching human dignity among all the bleak, slovenly despair. Both principals have been defeated by life, and whatever love they once had is now no consolation at all. Spa11 is a pasty, pudgy. dead-eyed wreck, blinking at the world in perpetually resigned befuddlement. But he has a kind of peace, the peace of having surrendered to his fate. Lesley Manville is more articulate and more angry — shell-shocked almost. When the obtrusive and ham-fisted score from Andrew Dickson has the decency to let up, the emotional truth of these performances can be harrowing. Both players bring a sincerity to this film that's absent from much of Leigh's work. But many of the supporting roles are far less persuasive, and some teeter on the brink of caricature. You can't quite figure out why they're allowed to hog so much screen time, apart from the fact that, after all that improvisational creativity from the actor, Leigh evidently feels awkward about hacking the part to bits, as would happen in a more conventional movie.
But the other defect is that, even when the performances are wonderful, they exist in isolation — as performances, rather than as flesh and blood people buffeted by events. Leigh's creative process values character over plot, and that's a particular disadvantage this time round, as the entire film pivots on a life-transforming crisis and its redemptive powers. Even Spall and Manville can't quite pull it off, happier wallowing in the stagnant certainties of life during the first half of the film than in the soapier narrative of the second. After the detour into Topsy Duly, this is a film for hardcore Leigh groupies only.
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