“HOW MUCH BETTER IS IT TO WEEP AT JOY THAN TO JOY AT WEEPING?”: FILMS BY MIKE LEIGH
The great prickly humanist of British cinema, Mike Leigh has forged a body of work unique in its concern for the struggles of ordinary people and the social fabric of working-class London. Famously born from a process of extensive improvisation with his powerhouse actors, Leigh’s films inhabit a register of tragicomic despair that, thanks to their unwavering compassion, never slips into miserabilism. His work is so gracefully attuned to that pained push and pull on the conscience when one struggles to do what is right to one’s own self. And it is equally attuned to an even rarer frequency: the joy that can arise from doing so. From his early slice-of-life portraits of Thatcher-era Britain to his award-winning international triumphs, Leigh plumbs the darkest depths of the human condition without ever losing hope.
Films in this Program
Mike Leigh
112 minutes
A darkly comic portrait of late Thatcher-era London, HIGH HOPES examines the different lives of a pair of siblings: Cyril (Philip Davis), a caustic motorcycle courier who takes pride in his working class roots, and Valerie (Heather Tobias), a high-strung aspirant to upper-middle class materialism. Cyril and girlfriend Shirley (Ruth Sheen) debate the merits of starting a family as they help Cyril’s aging mother (Edna Doré) cope with senility; Valerie, meanwhile, remains oblivious not only of her mother’s plight but also of the infidelities committed by her boorish husband Martin (Philip Jackson). Applying his cutting yet sympathetic observations of human behavior to a transitional cultural climate, Leigh lays bare both the futile striving of the lower-middle class and the oblivious grotesquerie of the upper-middle class.
“Cyril and Shirley both have and are the high hopes of Leigh's title, which is absolutely not ironic; and theirs is a story of grace under pressure.” - Gilbert Adair, Sight & Sound
“Cyril and Shirley both have and are the high hopes of Leigh's title, which is absolutely not ironic; and theirs is a story of grace under pressure.” - Gilbert Adair, Sight & Sound
Mike Leigh
103 minutes
This invigorating film from Mike Leigh was his first international sensation. Melancholy and funny by turns, it is an intimate portrait of a working-class family in a suburb just north of London—an irrepressible mum and dad (Alison Steadman and Jim Broadbent) and their night-and-day twins, a bookish good girl and a troubled, ill-tempered layabout (Claire Skinner and Jane Horrocks). Leigh and his typically brilliant cast create, with extraordinary sensitivity and craft, a vivid, lived-in story of ordinary existence, in which even modest dreams—such as the father’s desire to open a food truck—carry enormous weight. One of Leigh’s funniest and most tender films is also one of his most optimistic about family ties.
“Mike Leigh's work has always imbued a respect for struggling individuals, and how the kindness of life in little moments means so much in the expanse of an existence that rarely rises above modesty. LIFE IS SWEET is about the dynamics of a working-class family unit, but it's also about their limitations, how they choose to push past their daily troubles, or when to accept resignation. Complex, fully lived-in and drop-dead gorgeous.” - SilentDawn
“Mike Leigh's work has always imbued a respect for struggling individuals, and how the kindness of life in little moments means so much in the expanse of an existence that rarely rises above modesty. LIFE IS SWEET is about the dynamics of a working-class family unit, but it's also about their limitations, how they choose to push past their daily troubles, or when to accept resignation. Complex, fully lived-in and drop-dead gorgeous.” - SilentDawn
Mike Leigh
131 minutes
The brilliant and controversial NAKED, from director Mike Leigh, stars David Thewlis as Johnny, a charming and eloquent but relentlessly vicious drifter. Rejecting anyone who might care for him, the volcanic Johnny hurls himself around London on a nocturnal odyssey, colliding with a succession of other desperate and dispossessed people and scorching everyone in his path. With a virtuoso script and raw performances from Thewlis and costars Katrin Cartlidge and Lesley Sharp, Leigh’s depiction of England’s underbelly is an amalgam of black comedy and doomsday prophecy that took the best director and best actor prizes at the 1993 Cannes Film Festival.
"Mike Leigh's NAKED is a great one -- a film of brutal impact, withering wit and humanity. It deserves one of the highest accolades movies can receive: Seeing it shakes you up, changes your vision." - Michael Wilmington, The Chicago Reader
"Mike Leigh's NAKED is a great one -- a film of brutal impact, withering wit and humanity. It deserves one of the highest accolades movies can receive: Seeing it shakes you up, changes your vision." - Michael Wilmington, The Chicago Reader
Mike Leigh
142 minutes
With unexpected startling spontaneity and gripping emotional realism, SECRETS & LIES crafts an intricate, richly human exploration of the buried tensions and heartaches that run beneath the surface of family life. The story concerns Cynthia (Brenda Blethyn, awarded Best Actress at Cannes), a working-class white woman whose personal and interpersonal lives are transformed when she learns that a Black optometrist is the child she gave up for adoption 27 years prior. Created, like director Mike Leigh’s other films, after long months of intensely collaborative improvisation, SECRETS & LIES is remarkable for its lived-in warmth and humor, and above all for its unflinching honesty in capturing the everyday evasions and deceptions that can define our lives. The acclaimed winner of the 1996 Cannes Film Festival’s Palme d’Or, Leigh’s mid-’90s masterpiece cemented his status as the poet laureate of modern family life.
"This is exactly the challenge taken up by Leigh: bring film back to its community calling and remember that, beyond the confusion of images and identities, there are people with pasts, sufferings, things to say, families -- and we are all part of it." - Noël Herpe, Positif
"This is exactly the challenge taken up by Leigh: bring film back to its community calling and remember that, beyond the confusion of images and identities, there are people with pasts, sufferings, things to say, families -- and we are all part of it." - Noël Herpe, Positif
Mike Leigh
129 minutes
Over the course of four seasons, ANOTHER YEAR explores the life of a sublimely happy older married couple, Tom (Jim Broadbent) and Gerri (Ruth Sheen), and their various friends and family members, in particular Mary (shatteringly crafted in a career-best performance from Lesley Manville) who struggle to find the happiness that Tom and Gerri have cultivated. Like Monet with another clump of water lilies, Mike Leigh presents another family-and-friends group portrait, a movie in which the distant sob or throb of sadness is never entirely absent. With its immersive sweetness and gentleness, this is among the best of the utterly confident and unhurried ensemble picture from Leigh, containing his distinctively extended dialogue scenes of unpointed ordinariness, and a lowered narrative heartbeat to which you have to make a conscious effort to adjust. The power of ANOTHER YEAR creeps up on you by stealth until it takes you over. It’s a deeply involving, intelligent, compassionate drama of the sort only Leigh can create.
"Make no mistake: ANOTHER YEAR is brilliant, heart-breaking, life-affirming and ceaselessly engrossing. It's as deeply felt and humane a work of cinema as anything by Zhang Yimou, Federico Fellini or Ingmar Bergman." - Jim Schembri
"Make no mistake: ANOTHER YEAR is brilliant, heart-breaking, life-affirming and ceaselessly engrossing. It's as deeply felt and humane a work of cinema as anything by Zhang Yimou, Federico Fellini or Ingmar Bergman." - Jim Schembri
Mike Leigh
118 minutes
Mike Leigh's HAPPY-GO-LUCKY is an unassuming triumph of open-heartedly complex, humanist filmmaking - a look at a few chapters in the life of Poppy (Sally Hawkins), an unwaveringly cheery North London schoolteacher whose optimism is ever at odds with the world around her. Welcome in the New Year with this piece of small-scale hope as Leigh explores just how hard it is, and how meaningful, for people to retain their essential goodness in spite of the indignities that subsume their lives.
"When we talk about movie masterpieces, what usually come to mind are epic works that wow us with their scale, pictures that spring from grand ambitions and even grander budgets. But it takes more than ambition, and more than money, to make an intimate masterpiece like Mike Leigh's HAPPY-GO-LUCKY, a picture so seemingly light that it might be hours (or even days) before you realize how deep and rich it really is. Made in characteristic Leigh fashion -- instead of following a strict script, the actors develop the characters through improvisational sessions -- HAPPY-GO-LUCKY has no plot to speak of. Whatever story there is develops as a result of our deepening connection with the lead character, an unceasingly optimistic primary-school teacher named Poppy whose cheerfulness isn't a way of hiding from a chaotic, sometimes hostile world but a means of facing it. Leigh sets himself up for failure right there: Who wants to see movies about happy people? Misery, stress and confusion are the stuff of dramatic tension. But Leigh and his actors work mysterious magic in HAPPY-GO-LUCKY. This is a movie about hitting the groove of everyday life and, miraculously, getting music out of it." - Stephanie Zacharek
"When we talk about movie masterpieces, what usually come to mind are epic works that wow us with their scale, pictures that spring from grand ambitions and even grander budgets. But it takes more than ambition, and more than money, to make an intimate masterpiece like Mike Leigh's HAPPY-GO-LUCKY, a picture so seemingly light that it might be hours (or even days) before you realize how deep and rich it really is. Made in characteristic Leigh fashion -- instead of following a strict script, the actors develop the characters through improvisational sessions -- HAPPY-GO-LUCKY has no plot to speak of. Whatever story there is develops as a result of our deepening connection with the lead character, an unceasingly optimistic primary-school teacher named Poppy whose cheerfulness isn't a way of hiding from a chaotic, sometimes hostile world but a means of facing it. Leigh sets himself up for failure right there: Who wants to see movies about happy people? Misery, stress and confusion are the stuff of dramatic tension. But Leigh and his actors work mysterious magic in HAPPY-GO-LUCKY. This is a movie about hitting the groove of everyday life and, miraculously, getting music out of it." - Stephanie Zacharek
