Nothing is all
All or Nothing, dir. Mike Leigh.
From the opening shot down a slippery nursing home corridor where a flat-footed girl mops with dark dedication, to the radiant closing sequence at her fat brother’s bedside, this is consummate film-making. Every movement, every image, every flicker of human experience counts.
All or Nothing has the raw humanity of Leigh’s 1996 Palme D’Or winner, Secrets and Lies; its characters might live on a squalid 21st-century English housing estate but Leigh invests them with the depth and vulnerability that distinguished the 19th-century characters in Topsy-Turvy, his cinema biography of Gilbert and Sullivan. He uses his extraordinary ensemble of actors rather as Ingmar Bergman did, gratifying audience expectation (yes, it’s Timothy Spall again, but even better than last time. How can a hangdog slouch with bad teeth be so mesmerising?). But then Leigh goes further, extracts more.
Phil (Spall) is a taxi driver. Life passes through his mini-cab in a Chaucerian shuffle (remember the photo sessions in Secrets and Lies?—this is even better). His pretty, sour wife Penny (Lesley Manville) has lines on her face that signify forbearance turned to contempt. Their mop-wielding daughter Rachel (an heroic performance from Alison Garland) is stolid and withdrawn. Their son Rory (James Corden, also splendid) is overweight, hyperaggressive and stuck in a dead end of expletives.
Phil and Penny’s friends and their kids are equally stymied in life—sporadically employed, alcoholic, hopeless, violent, perverse, defensive (the children especially). But Leigh’s great gift is his ability to peel through layers of predictability to the core of ordinary people (he restores integrity to that much abused adjective ‘ordinary’). Never sentimental, never easy in his explorations, he is chronically alert to signs of life and love—a fine addiction for a film-maker—and he has the technical wits and gifts to render them on screen. All or Nothing is true to its title. It’s risky, dark, triumphant, and even better, I’d hazard, than Secrets and Lies. Don’t miss it.
Morag Fraser
Punching the rough
Punch Drunk Love, dir. P.T. Anderson.
Adam Sandler is best known as a comedian. (Well, I’m sure that’s what he puts on his tax return, anyway.) In a string of box office hits, he has perfected an unvarying comic persona: the nerd as hero. The classic Sandler character is an infantile man, struggling with suppressed rage, but who is nevertheless sweet natured.
Punch Drunk Love finds Sandler trying to adapt this stock-in-trade act to create