All or Nothing

The great British film director Mike Leigh has come out with a new film – not that you'd be likely to have noticed if you live in the US. Despite critical and commercial success with his last three releases, Secrets & Lies, Career Girls, and Topsy-Turvy, All or Nothing seems to have vanished without a trace, playing at 15 cinemas for two weeks and then disappearing altogether. I saw it at my local second-run art-house cinema (not too many of those to go round) only one month after it opened.

But in a way, it's more surprising that Secrets & Lies ended up with with more than $13 million at the box office and an Oscar nomination to boot than it is that All or Nothing has managed to pull in less than one percent of that figure. Insofar as UK films do well across the pond, they seem to be either costume dramas or comedies; Mike Leigh, on the other hand, specialises in the kind of closely-observed working-class kitchen-sink pieces which generally don't do well even when it's a big-name American helming.

And while Brenda Blethyn had a wonderful opportunity, in Secrets & Lies, to indulge in wide-barrelled melodrama, Timothy Spall, in All or Nothing, is quite the opposite: shut up, worn down, a man who essentially has the same expression on his face for 90% of the film. Here he shows nothing of the natural exuberance we saw in Life is Sweet: his south London minicab driver would consider liver in lager to be a depressing joke rather than an unmissable business opportunity.

The film is set over a long weekend on a typically bleak council estate, where we concentrate on three families struggling to keep things together. Spall has a common-law wife (Lesley Manville) who despairs of the situation she's found herself in, and eventually cracks; an overweight daughter (Alison Garland) who never even comes close to breaking out of her shell; and an even more overweight son (James Corden) who rages in a late-adolescent way against everything and everyone, especially his mother. Meanwhile, a single mother watches her daughter fall pregnant by an angry and abusive young man, and the daughter of a pair of alcoholics tries to demonstrate some degree of control over her life by teasing a shy young boy and stealing other girls' boyfriends.

But All or Nothing is not unremittingly bleak in the way that, say, Nil by Mouth was. In a rare case of directorial flinching, Leigh actually provides the film with two endings. The first comes at the emotional climax of the film, when Spall finally breaks down and Manville attempts to comfort him. Tellingly, however, Manville never requites Spall's declaration of love, and after they kiss, we get the following exchange (or something very like it):

Spall: Shall we go to bed?
Manville: Yes, we've got to get up very early.

We then fade to black, and enter the coda: an upbeat scene in a hospital, of all places, where everybody seems to have had an overnight spa treatment and laughter flows freely. The other story lines are forgotten: we leave the drunks passed out over each other, and the single mother and her single mother-to-be stuck on the sofa, with nowhere to turn. Only the drunks' daughter (Sally Hawkins, in a role which recapitulates that of Jane Horrocks in Life is Sweet) seems to have learned anything, shocked into reality by the degree to which her teasing has been taken seriously. We only appreciate the power we have when we see it go too far.

One thing for which we really should be grateful is the way in which Leigh is attempting to break the mold of gritty, working-class filmmaking by spending a lot of time and effort lighting and framing every shot. No hand-held graininess here: Leigh is closer, in this sense, to Spike Lee than he is to someone like Ken Loach. The director of photography, Dick Pope, doesn't romanticise the housing estate, but he gives the characters dignity by shooting them all with the care and attention that he would give a king.

That said, All or Nothing will work very well on the small screen as well as in the cinema. If you've missed your chance to grab its theatrical release, I highly recommend you rent it when you get the chance.

Posted by Felix at 10:18 EST

Comments

The last two films I saw before I set sail for Antarctica were 'All or
Nothing' (Mike Leigh) and 'Sweet Sixteen' (Loach). The former I thought was
good..until I saw the latter and realised everything that the first was
missing. Please, if you want to see a gritty UK film, see Sweet Sixteen
and send me the review.

Posted by: Rhian at 9:33 EST, December 04, 2002

Ah, but what extra pleasure for a South Londoner to see this film. The drive through the Blackwall Tunnel, and was it Margate where he went to?
I loved the film.
Erika

Posted by: Erika at 5:30 EST, December 07, 2002

I am producer/engineer and want to do stuff with Jeffrey Citron. Get this and get him to read my email and I will figure out some way to repay you. If he likes what I have to say, I will cut you in and owe you for the rest of my life.

Please if you know, just at least forward.

Thanks,
Raeann

Posted by: Raeann at 8:05 EST, June 22, 2003