Mike Leigh

Secrets and Lies

If a film fan had never heard of director Mike Leigh, one might explain him as a British Woody Allen. Not that Leigh's films are whimsical or neurotic; they are tough-love examinations of British life--funny, outlandish, and biting. His films share a real immediacy with Allen's work: they feel as if they are happening now. Leigh works with actors--real actors--on ideas and language. There is no script at the start (and sometimes not at the end). Secrets and Lies involves Hortense (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), an elegant black woman wanting to learn her birth mother's identity. She will find it's Cynthia (Brenda Blethyn), who is one of the saddest creatures we've seen in film. She's also one of the most real and, ultimately, one of the most lovable. Timothy Spall is Cynthia's brother, a giant man full of love who is being slowly defeated by his fastidious wife (Phyllis Logan).

There is a great exuberance of life in Secrets & Lies, winner of the Palme D'Or and best actress (Blethyn) at the 1996 Cannes Film Festival--not Zorba-type life but the little battles fought and won every day. Leigh's honest interpretation of daily life is usually found only on the stage. Secrets & Lies is more realistic than a stage production, however, especially when Leigh shows us uninterrupted scenes. Critic David Denby states that Leigh has "made an Ingmar Bergman film without an instant of heaviness or pretension." If that sounds like your cup of tea, see Secrets & Lies. --Doug Thomas

After her adoptive parents die, a young black woman seeks out her natural birth mother, only to discover her mother is white, thus setting in motion the revelation of a whole series of secrets and lies.

Topsy-Turvy

At first glance, a musical period comedy-drama about Gilbert and Sullivan seems an odd fit for British filmmaker Mike Leigh, who made his name with searing, intense contemporary dramas such as Secrets and Lies and Career Girls. What could the Victorian world of two composers (of "light opera," no less) have to offer a filmmaker who specializes in the world of modern-day middle class England? Plenty, as it turns out. A wonderful meditation on the creation of art, Topsy-Turvy catches Gilbert and Sullivan at a crossroads in their illustrious careers. Having scored numerous hits (like The Pirates of Penzance and HMS Pinafore), they've reached a creative dry spot with their latest, Princess Ida. Composer Sullivan (Allan Corduner) despairs of ever being taken seriously, and vows to write a "serious" piece, much to the consternation of librettist Gilbert (Jim Broadbent), who's flummoxed and unyielding when asked to change another of his whimsical, "topsy-turvy" scenarios. All seems lost when, thanks to his wife's insistence, Gilbert attends a Japanese exposition in London, and faster than you can say "Three little maids from school are we," inspiration strikes.

The rest, as they say, is history, but Leigh re-creates the creative process with meticulous and loving care, from the writing of The Mikado to its staging (wherein Gilbert acts as director), costuming, orchestration, rehearsal, and ultimate premiere. Some may balk at the running time of the film (almost three hours), but it's a journey well worth taking, down to the precise details of late-19th-century London. Still, you'll know you're in Mike Leigh territory, with his precise characterizations and a heartfelt, melancholy ending. And no one has a way with actors like Leigh. This peerless ensemble, headed up by Broadbent in an Oscar-worthy performance, inhabits their characters like a second skin, and it's wonderful to see an authentic-feeling period drama in which the actors resemble real people and you don't expect someone glamorous like Helena Bonham Carter or Rupert Everett to pop up. Gilbert and Sullivan aficionados will revel in the reenactments of The Mikado (newcomers will likely be won over, too). All in all, a breathtaking film. --Mark Englehart

Naked - Criterion Collection

In between his breakthrough film (Life Is Sweet) and his world sensation (Secrets and Lies), filmmaker Mike Leigh created his most abrasive and daring film, Naked. This "Angry Young Man" for the 1990s follows an acidic wanderer (Cannes award winner David Thewlis) who observes a corrosive Britain. An intellectual, bitter film filtered with debauchery and black humor, Naked follows the bemusing Johnny as he crosses in and out of doorways, drifting into old acquaintances and new lost souls. It is more of a character film than sheer entertainment and thus it can be hard to watch, but it offers one of the great performances of the 1990s. Thewlis would have been an Oscar shoo-in if he'd worn a tuxedo and repressed his emotions. He didn't, and his brilliant work went unrecognized in mainstream America. --Doug Thomas

One of the essential films of the 1990s, Mike Leigh's brilliant and controversial "Naked" stars David Thewlis as Johnny, a charming, eloquent, and relentlessly vicious drifter in London. Rejecting all those who would care for him, the volcanic Johnny hurls himself into a nocturnal odyssey through the city, colliding with a succession of the desperate and the dispossessed and scorching everyone in his path. With a virtuoso script and raw performances by Thewlis and costars Katrin Cartlidge and Lesley Sharp, Leigh's panorama of England's crumbling underbelly is a showcase of black comedy and doomsday prophecy, and was the winner of the best director and actor prizes at the 1993 Cannes Film Festival.

Vera Drake

The brilliant writer-director Mike Leigh (Topsy-Turvy, Secrets and Lies, Naked) has crafted an utterly compelling movie about one of the most controversial of topics. An irrepressibly hopeful housecleaner in 1950s London named Vera Drake (Imelda Staunton, Antonia and Jane, Shakespeare in Love) mothers everyone around her, from her own family to helpless shut-ins and lonely men living in tiny, isolated apartments. None of these people know that Vera also helps young women get rid of unwanted pregnancies, until the police appear and tear her world apart. Vera Drake isn't just an inspired character portrait; through simple and straightforward scenes, the movie weaves a quiet but mesmerizing portrait of how people--both wealthy and poor--cope with adversity. Though wrenching, Vera Drake has too much life to be depressing. Leigh is deservedly famous for his work with actors; every character brims with truth and Staunton's performance deserves every award it could possibly win. --Bret Fetzer

All Or Nothing (2002)

Writer-director Mike Leigh, after a brief detour into the period drama of Topsy-Turvy, returns to the lives of contemporary working-class Brits. Phil (longtime Leigh collaborator Timothy Spall, Secrets and Lies) is a quiet taxi driver whose marriage to Penny (Lesley Manville) has gone dry, though neither has quite realized it. They bicker with each other and their children and try to find some pleasure in going out with friends, but their friends have their own struggles--even Penny's coworker Maureen (Ruth Sheen), whose naturally buoyant personality is colliding with her resentful daughter's pregnancy. All or Nothing is among Leigh's bleakest films; the relentless misery of these characters' lives is hard to take. But thanks to the incredibly committed acting, when moments of tenderness come, they have a devastating impact. --Bret Fetzer

Three-time Oscar®-nominated* writer/director Mike Leigh (Topsy-Turvy, Secrets & Lies) delivers this "rewarding vibrant poetic slice-of-life drama" (Variety) about an ordinary family dealing with the complexities of life and a crisis that takes them on a tumultuous emotional journey. In a crowded South London apartment building, Penny, a working mom, struggles to keep her wayward daughter, her lazy son and her disillusioned partner on the right path. But when tragedy befalls one of her loved ones, she finds that support comes from the most unexpected places and brings the most surprising results. *1999: Original Screenplay, Topsy-Turvy; 1996: Director, Original Screenplay, Secrets & Lies

Career Girls

This simple comedy by British filmmaker Mike Leigh (Secrets and Lies) concerns the reunion of two women friends from university days who try hard, although awkwardly, to rediscover their early closeness. They succeed beautifully and experience a series of chance encounters with old friends and lovers whom they once knew together. Katrin Cartlidge (Breaking the Waves) and Lynda Steadman are outstanding, playing their characters via flashback in their grungy, early 20s as well as their more polished, contemporary selves at age 30. Following the complex ambitions of Secrets and Lies, Career Girls almost looks like a holiday for Leigh, but it is no less the rich product of his now-famous process of symbiotic rehearsal and writing. The film is also graced by some of the most delicate passages of remembered love between two people seen in a long time. --Tom Keogh

Reunited six years after graduation, two unlikely college roommates take a funny and poignant look at the girls they were and the woman they have become.

Abigail's Party

ABIGAIL'S PARTY features Beverly (Alison Steadman) a bitingly funny hostess of a dainty evening party at which her husband has the ultimate bad taste of having a heart attack on her new living room carpet. Unable to decide which is more important, her dying husband or her new, very expensive, carpet, Abigail must come to terms with where her true priorities lay. One of Mike Leigh's greatest works, ABIGAIL'S PARTY reaches a moment when the unbearable and hopeless fuse to create an explosion of incredible humor and tremendous insight into the state of human affairs.

Nuts in May

No Description Available.
Genre: Feature Film-Drama
Rating: UN
Release Date: 29-JUN-2004
Media Type: DVD

Meantime

This early Mike Leigh film was made for British television in 1983 (released theatrically in 1985), and introduced both Gary Oldman and Tim Roth. Set in the Thatcher era, the story--typically for Leigh--is more a matter of dramatic evolution than a conventionally realized script. The action revolves around a middle-class family whose male members are all on the government dole, and whose matriarch (Marion Bailey) is long-suffering in the sight of her two sons, one a half-wit (Roth) and the other a cynical bum (Phil Daniels). Oldman plays the latter's skinhead pal, mostly a goof with no future, and Alfred Molina portrays a relative of the brothers strongly resistant to nudging their lives in a more constructive direction. The story, such as it is, is actually a series of discrete, deceptively unambitious, and highly entertaining scenes that could just as easily stand on their own as belong to some greater whole. Leigh, not quite fully baked as a filmmaker in the early 1980s, occasionally engages a rather obvious wit, such as shooting a long take in a laundry room from an angle that favors the sight of a washing machine and ignores the characters from the waist up. The remarkable actors, however, are as deeply immersed in their roles as in any of Leigh's work, and the film is ultimately as moving and funny as one expects from this unique director. --Tom Keogh

Vera Drake

The brilliant writer-director Mike Leigh (Topsy-Turvy, Secrets and Lies, Naked) has crafted an utterly compelling movie about one of the most controversial of topics. An irrepressibly hopeful housecleaner in 1950s London named Vera Drake (Imelda Staunton, Antonia and Jane, Shakespeare in Love) mothers everyone around her, from her own family to helpless shut-ins and lonely men living in tiny, isolated apartments. None of these people know that Vera also helps young women get rid of unwanted pregnancies, until the police appear and tear her world apart. Vera Drake isn't just an inspired character portrait; through simple and straightforward scenes, the movie weaves a quiet but mesmerizing portrait of how people--both wealthy and poor--cope with adversity. Though wrenching, Vera Drake has too much life to be depressing. Leigh is deservedly famous for his work with actors; every character brims with truth and Staunton's performance deserves every award it could possibly win. --Bret Fetzer