Neil Young's Film Lounge

Neil Young’s Film Lounge – All or Nothing

ALL OR NOTHING

6/10

UK (UK/Fr) 2002 : Mike Leigh : 128 mins

After Monsters Ball, All Or Nothing is this years second family-based drama to pivot on the misfortunes of an obese male teenager: here, the aggressively onboxious Rory Bassett (James Corden), son of lardy taxi-driver Phil (Timothy Spall) and tiny, bird-like supermarket check-out operator Penny (Lesley Manville), whose other child is introverted care-home worker Rachel (Alison Garland). When the permanently angry, chip-guzzling Rory falls victim to a heart-attack, the crisis is the catalyst that brings into sharp focus the simmering discontents in the Bassetts marriage.

Writer-director Leigh extends his attention to several of the familys friends and neighbours: Pennys chirpy workmate Maureen (Ruth Sheen), Maureens argumentative daughter Donna (Helen Coker), Donnas hot-head boyfriend Jason (the entertainingly alarming Daniel Mays); Phils fellow driver Ron (Paul Jesson), Rons alcoholic wife Carol (Marion Bailey) and their malcontent daughter Samantha (Sally Hawkins), who is secretly lusted-after by Craig (Ben Crompton), a loner who hangs around the run-down London council estate where most of the characters unhappily reside.

All Or Nothing represents, after the Victorian-bourgeois excursion of Topsy-Turvy, a return to Leighs more familiar time-frame and social milieu. This is the working-class London of today, a grimy, noisy, cramped environment in which the residents chafe under forced proximity. Undereducated, overworked and underpaid, Leighs characters are essentially the victims of the Thatcher-Major-Blair years, their various physical and psychological problems the result of wider political-economic forces they can neither comprehend nor resist.

Its an undeniably depressing scenario, but Leigh wisely concentrates on character. As ever working closely with his actors through a long period of research and improvisation, Leigh allows the story to develop organically from the characters interactions. Many scenes take the form of petty, needling squabbles in which people deliberately get on each others nerves. Theres much dark humour in these pointlessly venomous exchanges Samantha and Donna have one especially sharp encounter in which the actual words spoken are essentially bland and neutral, but where both sides are acutely aware of the vicious subtext.

At one early stage Maureen innocently asks her daughter Wanna bit o chicken pie?, only for Donna to retort with an excessively vehement NO! this kind of ear for dialogue is realism taken to a heightened degree of comic, slightly dangerous energy. But Leigh is equally effective in more serious confrontations especially the final showdown between Phil and Penny, in which their relationship hangs precariously in the balance, and our sympathies swing between them in a startlingly complex manner: Spall and Manville are both first-rate in this long, difficult scene.

Its noticeable that this sequence plays out with very little musical accompaniment elsewhere, we get rather too much of Andrew Dicksons mournful, strings-based score that rather intrusively underlines just how bitter-sweet the whole thing is supposed to be. Leigh occasionally overboard in this regard there’s one gratuitously depressing moment when the saintly Rachel literally has to mop up an incontinent patients messy shits. Rorys hospital-dash crisis is also somewhat more melodramatic than it need be, Phil choosing that precise hour to switch off his taxi-radio and mobile phone and escape to a windy, isolated beach for a bit of existential soul-searching.

By taking on such a large number of characters, Leigh perhaps inevitably leaves a lot of rough edges dangling the Craig-Samantha subplot, for instance, feels like its wandered in from another film altogether, as do all scenes featuring the permanently inebriated Carol. True to its title, All Or Nothing is an undeniably uneven, not quite successful piece of work but at its best, this is a compellingly serious, nuanced, sympathetic excursion into some damaged, believably real lives.

28th September, 2002
(seen 14^th June, UCI Silverlink, North Shields)

by Neil Young

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