WhatzUp

All or Nothing
by Derek Neff

You either like Mike Leigh’s films, or you don’t, and no single review is going to convert you into the ranks of those who treasure Naked, Career Girls, Topsy-Turvy, etc. If you didn’t love those movies, then without a doubt you will not find much to like in All or Nothing. So the question then becomes: for Mike Leigh fans, how does this film stack up?

All or Nothing is a return to the working-class world familiar to us from Leigh’s earlier movies. We enter the world of three down-on-their-luck families, all of whom live in the same dreary London council flats complex and eke out a less-than-modest living for themselves by performing drudge work that requires little skill and no ambition. The Bassett family is the picture of urban defeat: Phil (played by the great Timothy Spall) is a minicab driver who lacks the gumption to get up early enough in the morning to make as much money as he could; his wife Penny (Leslie Manville) is a cashier at a grocery store who — you can tell just by looking at her — is trying desperately to find a reason not to die of heartbreak, or boredom, or sheer disappointment; their two children, Rachel and Rory (Alison Garland and James Corden, respectively), are both severely overweight and show little hope of overcoming the conditions of their upbringing. There is still love in the house, but it shows itself only in little gestures of affection, in half-fledged efforts to reach out to each other, in attempts to connect, if only for a moment, with their best selves.

The next two-plus hours of the movie show us a variety of scenes involving all parties in a loose storyline that has little to do with plot and everything to do with character. Leigh is not interested in making fun of his characters. Indeed, he shows us that there is a certain heroism in just keeping your head above water every day, in trying to make sense of your situation, and in perhaps overcoming it. The movie is bleak, bleak, bleak, but the people who inhabit the movie still have hope, and Leigh gives them a brand of dignity possessed only by the down-but-not-yet-out.

Leigh’s movies are severely naturalistic. The behavior and dialogue are so real you almost feel you’re watching unvarnished reality as it unrolls in documentary fashion in front of you. But there is a guiding consciousness in his films, a vague sense of symmetry and meaning that often doesn’t become clear until the movie’s end.

How does All or Nothing stack up against Leigh’s past work? It doesn’t match the potency and brilliance of Naked, but then again few things do. However, I would place All or Nothing on a par with the wonderful Secrets and Lies, and I would recommend it without reservation to anyone who has followed Leigh’s career to this point. There is no one working in movies today who compromises less on his vision and his methods. I honestly don’t know how he does what he does so well.