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ALL
OR NOTHING
6/10
UK (UK/Fr) 2002 : Mike Leigh : 128 mins
After
Monster’s Ball,
All Or Nothing is this year’s 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 family’s friends and neighbours:
Penny’s chirpy workmate Maureen (Ruth Sheen), Maureen’s argumentative
daughter Donna (Helen Coker), Donna’s hot-head boyfriend Jason (the entertainingly
alarming Daniel Mays); Phil’s fellow driver Ron (Paul Jesson), Ron’s 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 Leigh’s 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, Leigh’s 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.
It’s
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. There’s
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.
It’s noticeable that this sequence plays out with very little musical accompaniment
– elsewhere, we get rather too much of Andrew Dickson’s 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 patient’s messy shits. Rory’s 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 it’s 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 14th June, UCI Silverlink, North Shields)
by Neil
Young
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