Program note for Pinewood Dialogue with Mike Leigh, Lesley Manville and Timothy Spall and screening of All or Nothing
September 25, 2002
Special Preview Screening

ALL OR NOTHING
United Artists, 2002, 128 mins. 35mm print courtesy of United Artists.
Written and directed by Mike Leigh. Produced by Simon Channing-Williams. Original music by Andrew Dickson. Photography by Dick Pope. Editing by Lesley Walker. Production design by Eve Stewart. Costume design by Jacqueline Durran. Principal cast: Timothy Spall (as Phil Bassett), Lesley Manville (Penny Bassett), Alison Garland (Rachel Bassett), James Corden (Rory Bassett), Ruth Sheen (Maureen), Marion Bailey (Carol), Paul Jesson (Ron), Kathryn Hunter (Cécile), Sally Hawkins (Samantha), Helen Coker (Donna), Daniel Mays (Jason), and Ben Crompton (Craig).

Screening followed by a Pinewood Dialogue with Mike Leigh, Lesley Manville, and Timothy Spall, moderated by David Schwartz, Chief Curator of Film. 

Feature films and television works written and directed by Mike Leigh

Excerpt from article, “Reasons to be Cheerful,” by Ryan Gilbey, Sight and Sound, October, 2002:

The opening shot of Mike Leigh’s most recent and most assured cinema film All or Nothing might in its concentrated dourness seem a peculiar cause for celebration. The camera is stationed at one end of a cramped corridor. At the other a young woman is industriously absorbed in the task of mopping the floor. It doesn’t appear to be getting any cleaner. Mournful strings make their presence felt on the soundtrack. An elderly woman appears in the background, taking fearful steps along the slippery floor, and for a few tortuous seconds you hold your breath and wonder if Leigh is about to puncture the solemnity with a jolt of tasteless slapstick. He isn’t, as it happens—the woman simply rejects the cleaner’s passing pleasantry with a vinegary sneer and hobbles off camera. But it’s an easy mistake to make. The film wrings much of its weirdly charged power from forcing glum situations to their dreadful conclusions, until the audience feels compelled, just as it might at a Fassbinder film, to ask: what else can possibly go wrong?

In its stubbornness, its austerity and its almost self-parodic bleakness, that first shot in All or Nothing promises a lot, and before it’s over it may have occurred to you that the film’s title has the ring of a dare about it. That’s appropriate: there are shots here, even entire scenes, when you pull back from the screen as if from a furnace, usually because the camera itself has forsworn any such retreat. Perhaps that’s why I felt an impulse that was alien, at least to my experience of watching Mike Leigh movies—about half way through that opening shot I had the urge to cheer. Those films described as crowd-pleasing—a term so ubiquitous it has lost whatever dubious currency it had—typically seek to unite the audience in laughter or goodwill. But All or Nothing, like several other new British films, should please a different kind of crowd—anyone, in fact, who has become weary of homegrown movies that have about them the neediness of the collecting tin.

All or Nothing wisely exploits its echoes of former work; it wouldn’t be stretching a point to see the film as Leigh’s Blue Velvet, a potholing expedition into territory previously examined only from the air. The movie is like a more sour remake of Life Is Sweet, departing from a scenario of greater domestic trauma but arriving at the same quietly euphoric denouement. In that 1990 comedy the bulimic daughter of a head chef gorged herself nightly, and allowed herself to be smeared with chocolate spread in afternoon sex sessions. The new picture reheats the food metaphor and loads it on to our laps; not since La Grande Bouffe can popcorn have been so unwise a viewing accompaniment.

Apparently unwilling to acknowledge a deeper bond, the characters communicate primarily through food. The dinner table is the only thing that brings together Phil, his pinch-faced wife Penny (Lesley Manville) and their overweight teenage offspring, the docile Rachel (Alison Garland) and the raging Rory (James Corden)—at least until a near-tragedy transforms a hospital bed into a new meeting place. At the table they silently delve into dinner while the mirthless laugh track on an out-of-shot television seems to mock them. Special reverence is reserved for a multipack of long-lasting burger buns given to Phil in lieu of a fare; in the kitchen of this household nearing the breadline, the mystical offering assumes the aura of a religious relic or a handful of magic beans.

Next door, chirpy single mum Maureen (Ruth Sheen) deploys persistent offers of chips to provoke tidbits of conversation from her surly teenage daughter, who is as thin as a French fry. Meanwhile alcoholic neighbour Carol (played by Marion Bailey, the Essex housewife who turned to the bottle in Meantime) neglects her duties, and the absence of food on the table gradually becomes a symptom of deeper malaise; the last time we glimpse her, she’s slipping into a mutually boozy unconsciousness with her bitter husband Ron (Paul Jesson). The symmetry so beloved of Leigh thus manifests itself not only in the siblings’ matching names (Rory and Rachel, recalling the twins Nicola and Natalie in Life Is Sweet) but in the various stages of domestic health: Maureen has fought for her happiness, and is still visibly fighting; Phil and Penny are able to replenish their loveless marriage, but only just; for Carol and Ron life has steadily dribbled away.

The film’s general bleakness, not dispelled until the last moment, seems both organic, in a way the apocalyptic posturing of Naked (1993) patently wasn’t, and also justified by Leigh’s quest for hope. Phil hasn’t only passed on corpulence to Rory (“He’s a big lad,” he smiles, almost proudly, when a foreign passenger bluntly asks if the boy is “fat like you?”). He has also bequeathed him complacency; this father may spend his days driving strangers around London’s tangle of streets, but there’s no sense he’s garnering any more experience than his son, who can barely bring himself to budge off the sofa. In another reference to an earlier film Leigh assembles a montage of Phil’s fares that recalls a similar sequence in Secrets & Lies (1995) when the subjects of a photographer (Spall again) were collected in a series of brief sketches. The crucial difference this time is that Spall has his back to his clients, and seems scarcely to notice them. That leathery, whiskery face just stares through the windscreen, his droopy eyes neither wanting nor expecting anything other than his grim lot.

But when, in that final scene, Phil at last shares with his family an anecdote about his work, and surrenders a cocked smile, you may want to leap out of the seat in which you have felt imprisoned for two hours, and cheer. In that moment the movie unexpectedly aligns itself with those Mike Leigh films where family unity is fiercely upheld (High Hopes, 1988; Life Is Sweet; Secrets & Lies) rather than forfeited for art (Topsy-Turvy, 1999) or honor (Meantime; Naked).

The Pinewood Dialogues, an ongoing series of screenings and discussions with significant creative figures in film, television, and digital media, as supported with a generous grant from The Pinewood Foundation.

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