General Release from Fri 5 Nov

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Mike Leigh/UK 2010/129 min

‘I can’t believe’, Mike Leigh stated a couple of years back, ‘I live in a country where, after more than a decade of a so-called “socialist” government, we still have a railway system, an education system, a healthcare system, a steel industry which are riddled with the curse and disease of privatization.” It’s not surprising to find the veteran director of some of the most consistently and profoundly compassionate and humane films ever made to be disturbed by gross inequality, and no doubt his frustration has increased ten-fold since the coalition decided to take a vastly oversized butcher’s knife to the state. In the depressive, individualistic atmosphere that will ensue, the kind of intensely humanistic films that are Leigh’s bread and butter will assume increased importance and poignancy, as they did in Thatcher’s reign.

His latest concerns content middle-class couple Tom (Jim Broadbent) and Gerri (Ruth Sheen) whose happiness and companionship is contrasted with that of their friends, primarily the secretary at Gerri’s NHS counselling centre, Mary (Lesley Manville). Facing spinsterdom, Mary’s volatility provides the emotional spine of the film, her every move jittery with acute desperation and loneliness. This being Leigh, there’s a slew of theme-enhancing supporting characters, and the entire cast turn in rich, detailed performances, with Manville’s manic emotionality the undoubted highlight. The only gripe is that you could perhaps accuse Leigh of over-egging the pudding; you may find your emotions well spent some time before Leigh stops pulling them from you, but it’s only because of the extraordinary empathy of the director himself. There’s no big emotional arc, no real emotional outbursts as there often is with Leigh; just an affecting portrait of people who fall through the cracks of atomized society, here given the compassion that they miss out on in real life.