As a kind of three cheers to the public for deciding not to watch Michael Bay’s latest piece of crap, I thought I’d post on some of the old Mike Leigh films I’ve seen which have been recently released on DVD. I’m a big fan of this guy’s films. I really wish there was an American making equivalent films here, but of course, there’s no one to fund them and no one to show them, and no one to watch them either.
I’ll start with the one I watched most recently, Four Days in July (1985). This is one of the last films Leigh made for TV, and I thought it would be one of the most ‘violent’ or heartbreaking, set as it is in Northern Ireland in the mid-80s during the always tense time of the Orange men march through the streets of Codmonger, or wherever.
In fact, it is the gentlest Leigh film I’ve seen, but not any less affecting than the others. Two women are pregnant for the first time; one from a lower class Catholic family, the other is the wife of a Protestant soldier; occupied and occupier, though both live in the city. Unlike most Leigh films, they don’t fight, don’t hate their neighbors, aren’t criminally stupid or ignorant. They are just getting by, though the stress of the ongoing troubles has taken, and is taking, a toll on both families. The husband in the Catholic family is crippled, and we learn rather late in the film, that he has actually been caught in no less than three attacks; once shot by the British soldiers, once caught in an IRA bomb. Both sides have personally targeted him unintentionally. It’s a scene that reminded me somewhat of one of my favorite scenes in all movie-dom, when Robert Shaw describes the sinking of the Indianapolis to Dreyfuss and Scheider, but of course it’s played in a much different way. Stephen Rea has a small role in this one. It’s quite good.
Grown-Ups (1980). Harrowing. Apparently the British think this film is a comedy, which absolutely bewilders me. Here’s the archetypically dysfunctional Leigh household in all its glory. Brenda Blethyn has a complete nervous breakdown on screen, which is as difficult to watch as most anything in Naked. These are people who have gotten so used to each other’s presence, that they take little notice of the effect of their words and actions towards one another. Yet they still maintain the slightest wisp of civility towards Blethyn’s character until she comes apart. Excellent stuff.
Kiss of Death (1977). Maybe the weakest of the three here, but certainly not bad by any filmmaker’s stretch. Toughest accents to decipher. The interplay of comedy and tragedy in Kiss of Death is made more explicit here, as the plot involves an undertaker’s assistant. Leigh would later seamlessly interweave huge ranges of emotion without the need to place a character in the actual proximity of dead bodies to achieve the effect. The main character, Trevor, is a nitwit in many ways, wants a girlfriend badly, and then screws it up due to the having learned bad manners from the yobs he associates with. Yet, in dealing with death (or near-death), he does seem to be able to do the right things, and the glimmer of adulthood and responsibility start to slowly come through.
All these films were worth watching. I had seen Meantime (1984) a year ago, a particularly vicious piece of work that came right before the gentle Four Days in July. Meantime stars Tim Roth and Gary Oldman, and while often hard to watch, it’s – as with everything Leigh makes – worth the effort.
As for the company releasing these DVDs – there are no subtitles, which is awful. The prints are scratched, but look decent. No commentaries, context, bios, or anything that would illuminate the films, and would be valuable for appreciating the stories.
I dont think there are many here who aren’t familiar with his current batch of films – I know Vera Drake got discussed – but I’d also strongly recommend All or Nothing and Career Girls as two great examples of his recent stuff.
Alan Clarke’s films are up next, including of course, Elephant, which is where, I believe, Van Sant took the title of his own film. Also, I’d like to hear from Pete his thoughts on these – if he saw them when they ran on TV, if they were liked or ignored.
I’ll throw a good word in for Life is Sweet, my favorite Mike Leigh film (a favorite among many).
of the films I’ve seen my favorite Mike Leigh is Naked. I must admit to a desire to see The Island: 1.) I am a sucker for high-concept science fiction where the clones rebel, robots go bad, the utopia collapses etc. and 2.) when I grow up I’m going to marry Scarlet Johanson.
Naked, which is noticably absent from DVD and VHS, was one of my favorite films (Mike Leigh or otherwise) and when it turned up on HBO’s On Demand menu, I was pleased to take another look at it after at least ten years. I was disappointed that the film did not hold up as well as I had hoped. Have you seen the film in the last few years?
If you like the idea of Scarlet in the Michael Bay film, I’d encourage you to read the new Kazuo Ishiguro novel (Never Let Me Go) and imagine the indie-starlet appearing in that.
I don’t know some of these older ones, so I just stuck Meantime into my queue and will try to check ’em out. I used to think “Naked” was my favorite, but… I’m with Jeff; Thewlis still dazzles, but the film doesn’t seem to endure with the same ferocity as the actor’s performance does.
I’ve grown more and more fond of “Career Girls,” and in part because it strikes me–in what will now be an explicitly heretical point of view to most of you who are fans–that Leigh has to be given credit for asking (forcing!) his actors to expand and develop complicated, unconventional, resonant identities in their roles. And that is clearly a significant directorly task. But the films tend to look bland, and although the characters’ complexity can often make the films quite tonally ambiguous and involving, at a plot level they too damn often seem schematic and writers’-workshop-py. By that I mean, the lived-in feel of the acting makes most of these flicks seem resistant to narrative, experiential, quasi-documentarian. But boil away the acting and I think they can seem a bit cheaply-imagined, full of ‘big’ bad events (long-discarded bi-racial daughter returns to family) which you see in ‘serious’ short stories by writers trying really, really hard to be taken seriously. “Career Girls” seemed to forego some of this portentousness and really allow the characters some luxury to just be–rather than to be reflections of something important.
In this, Leigh reminds me of Michael Bay, who… ah, I can’t even bring myself to work on that joke. Weren’t all of Bay’s movies about clones?
mmmm, indie starlet….
I’m sorry to hear that Naked dates somewhat–I’ll have to check it out again. it struck me at the time as a particularly effective and vivid portrayal of male alienation, along the lines of Five Easy Pieces (another favorite).
does Leigh share a problem with John Sayles–too often relying on rather conventional, even bland, filmmaking because he puts all of his energy into character/story? nothing against story/character, mind you, but more attention to formal concerns does not necessarily brand you as a bourgeois Quality director , does it?
Mike – I think that your criticism of Secrets & Lies may be right on (‘big’ bad events), but I’d say that film is much more of the exception than the rule with Leigh. Usually there isn’t such an “event” that forces the characters into action.
I own a tape of Naked, and have watched it a few times over the years – not lately – and I’m sure it doesn’t hold up to the shock I felt when I first saw it, but I can guarantee that that film does NOT look bland; it’s very well shot and composed, particularly in the way it stalks Thewlis, as he stalks others (security guard, poster hanger), and is an finely shot “night” movie.
For that matter, Topsy-Turvy is also very well shot. I’m not sure where you get the ‘bland’ tag.
It is the quasi-documentarian aspect (particularly in early films: Meantime, Four Days in July, Grown-Ups) that made me curious how they were seen upon release in the UK. Did people think they were being mocked? After all, many of these characters are uneducated, miserable, with awful jobs and barely held-together personal lives.
It seems churlish to criticize Leigh when there is so much crap out there, and when he clearly takes the craft of making movies so seriously, but I think it’s OK to hold Leigh to a different standard than Michael Bay. And in truth, I usually find watching a Leigh movie a chore, something that makes me feel worthy at the end of it, but rarely pleasurable. In that sense the analogy to Sayles is apt.
As I understand Leigh’s method, it is to develop a bare-bones plot, cast actors and then let his actors develop the dialogue through intensive improvisational scenes. When he is happy with the dialogue, they shoot. The result is an incredible level of rapport among the actors (and he uses the same stable repeatedly), but I think it is also why so many of his scenes slide over into melodrama. The dialogue is severed from the plot, which really only serves to allow the actors to display their craft. “Secrets & Lies†and “Naked†seemed to me to suffer most from this tendency, and perhaps the last half hour of “Vera Drake,†which I found excruciating and wholly at odds with the first hour.
The other problem with Leigh is his depiction of class. I know there was some discussion of this earlier, before I had watched “Vera Drakeâ€, and while I admit to some complexity on the part of Leigh, the guy (and his favorite actors) have a tin ear for most class dialogue. His depictions of the upper class are pure caricature – worse than anything from a Chaplin film, and Chaplin was trying to be funny. You see that clearly in “Naked†and “Vera Drake.â€
Then, you have the worthy working class, hard-working, unselfish, jam-packed with whatever the English equivalent of heartland values is. That is what ultimately does in “Vera Drake†for me. It is a nostalgic liberal middle class version of how the British working class used to be right after World War II (just as “Matewan” is a hopelessly romantic portrayal of the American working class as a liberal middle class director wishes it was). It is little different for these endless references to “the spirit of the Blitz†that have been regurgitated since the London bombings. Almost any Ken Loach movie, even the bad ones, has a better sense of the British working class, warts and all.
What Leigh does well, better than any director alive, is the lower middle class (the “aspirational classes†in Blairspeak): comfortable people in suburban homes with relatively secure jobs, trying to navigate their way between affluence and genuine deprivation. Here Leigh’s ear is unparalleled because he can capture nuances of longing for more but regret about loss of roots, about status within the family as a result of generational mobility, and about the renegotiation of gender relations as families climb into the middle class. That is why I have always found “Life is Sweet†to be Leigh’s best movie, a near-prefect portrait of the people Leigh understands best.
Helluva fine argument for (and slightly against) Leigh. A couple of reactions, to Chris and to Mark:
–Is Leigh a ‘bland’ director? I think what I’m getting at is the tendency to subsume composition, editing, technique, even art direction to the content of the film. There may be moments of flash or aesthetic focus, but in my reasonable if less-extensive survey of his work, it ain’t driving the films (nor even, for a couple, in the vehicle at all); I’m not opposed to this shift in focus, ’cause it’s obvious that one needn’t use a steadicam to make a good film, but I think one can assert that such formal/technical complacency is itself coupled with uncritical and romanticized notions about realism as the proper form for politics. And this acceptance of the two-shot, the stagey dialogue-driven composition fails, in some ways, as filmmaking, given the options–to paraphrase Suzan-Lori Parks, why does this thing have to be a film?
–Yes, it’s churlish to go after Leigh’s aesthetics, when Mauer’s original point of comparison was Michael Bay. But is it too much to ask of politically-attentive filmmakers that they pay attention to making films, too? Bunuel is really fucking wonderful at addressing class and at self-critically foregrounding the power of his representational medium.
We might tie this back to a whole other kind of debate about aesthetics and politics which we touched on with City of God and Babenco’s Pixote: the goal isn’t to say which is a better film, or which is more political, but to challenge and debate how the formal/filmic characteristics do impinge on the politics. Maybe that could be another thread.
–And I’ll tie this to Sayles. I almost brought him up when making my first claim–that he seems like a comparable director. But aesthetically I think there are a couple of key distinctions. First, Sayles is a writer–began in fiction, and still occasionally heads back, and his writing is amazing; look at his early novel _Union Dues_ or the collection _The Anarchists’ Convention_ and you may experience pangs of regret that this guy went to Hollywood. (More on that in a moment.) From what I’ve read or seen in interviews with Sayles, improvisation isn’t big on his sets; he very much pushes actors to imagine the kind of rich backstory that Leigh also demands, but they speak the words he’s written, and he’s written them carefully. In his best films, the dramatic narrative arc *and* the ear for dialogue are often brilliantly structured. (My favorites might include Brother from Another Planet and Limbo. And Matewan, too, but I’ll defend that in a moment.)
Second, the flatness of Sayles’ work, insofar as they are ‘bland’ in any way like the characterization I made of Leigh’s films, stems from financing. Read his book on the making of Matewan for a fine articulation of how the struggle for independent financing forced a number of limitations about production design, about the number of outside or night shots, about even scripting–as he found himself having to condense three or four scenes into one, t forego the extra costs of later shoots at the same location. And he’ll hire Haskell Wexler to film things, or other strong cinematographers. (I’ve heard Wexler in interviews complain about having to haggle with Sayles to get this or that cool shot, but at the very least there is on the part of this director a keen sense of what films might be able to do, or look like, even if his own storytelling rhythms lean toward the more conventional.) I do realize that Leigh may very well function under the same fiscal constraints–but he ain’t Ken Loach, and he has a lot more access to money (without the kinds of studio demands that an American filmmaker will suffer with the higher-resource funding).
–Defending Sayles and his class-consciousness & his romanticism. Leigh is working in a context where class is the subject of many filmmakers and many films, where its at least on some level central to cultural products of many variations. Name five American filmmakers working today who foreground labor–working for a living, and working in a community–the way Sayles does; I can’t think of one film of his where a character’s identity isn’t in some crucial way explicitly connected to the work they do, to that work’s position (economically, socially) in a given context. So… I think Leigh’s “weaknesses” in regard to class have to be assessed quite differently than Sayles.
Lastly, Sayles makes movies, as I understand it, because they are the forum for mass audience attention, and thus prime conduits for consciousness-raising. He quite explicitly employs genre (and got his ears wet writing some great generic stuff for Roger Corman, including The Howling, Piranha, and Battle Beyond the Stars) for its romantic, popular appeal. Matewan was a western, reimagined in light of labor battles; its deployment of highly-romanticized tropes of the heroic labor organizer have to be read not merely as middle-class nostalgic dreams but as an attempt to hijack Hollywood’s nostalgic, romanticized dreams of the past toward some explicit political ends. I don’t think he makes films like Leigh, even if they both seem to share many central thematic concerns, and may on occasion share certain limitations in drama and impact, as a result.
What’s churlish is to read anything into my comparison of Mike Leigh to Michael Bay.
Why must you keep defending Michael Bay, Mark? You ratfucker.
Formally speaking, I think Topsy-Turvy and Vera Drake to be incredibly rich films. The art direction, costumes, lighting, and compositions are all first rate. Vera Drake, in particular, is a gorgeous film to look at. While I will agree with Chris about Leigh’s penchant for valorizing the working class and simplifying the upper classes (not so much in Topsy-Turvy but definitely in Vera Drake), I still find his process and his products to be worthy and I always look forward to seeing what he will do next. I’ve mentioned Life is Sweet before, but I also want to throw in an accolade or two for High Hopes (another film that serves Chris’ “aspirational” thesis well).
I thought Topsy-Turvy had lots of nice costumes, but it was deadening–for a film about musicals with lots of goofy energy, it seemed so damned static.
But, again, I think I’m complaining about a meal I actually enjoyed, rather than a lack of real nourishment–I thought T-T was at least interesting, in the way Chris mentioned (oh, gosh, I learned a lot), and even with Sayles’ weakest films, like Sunshine State, they have so much more going on than your typical film that I end up appreciating the experience. It’s just not always my favorite thing to eat.
Well, in retrospect my comments about John Sayles were kind of a cheap shot, and should not have been dropped into the review of Leigh. It is true that I have been disappointed with several recent Sayles’ movies (Sunshine State, Men with Guns and City of Hope, even Lone Star), because they seem leaden and worthy rather than interesting, but he has done a lot of great work (esp. Brother from another planet) and does not deserve to be dismissed with an offhand remark.
And since I spent a portion of every course ranting about the lack of political or cultural attention to class in the US, it is hypocritical of me to go after ‘Matewan.’ I do think it has an overly-romantic view of the working class (and the possibility of overcoming racial division if you just have James Earl Jones on your side), but at least he attends to working class communities under attack.
So, a poor target. But I think it confirms my Britishness, no?
But having James Earl Jones on my side does mean I’m a good white guy, doesn’t it?
Listen, I liked your shot at Sayles–and I thought Michael was smart to make that connection right off. I think Mark’s comments about–and passion for–Leigh are invigorating. Even more so because I can kick back, with what are probably 60% reasoned argument and 40% cheap shots of my own, and see how smart people refute my claims, or fight with me. It’s what I liked about hanging out with these guys (most of ’em, or most of the time–except when Bruns was hopped on crank, and liable to fits of Altamont-like aggression), and what I have liked, do like about the chatter on these boards. Fun, challenging–it’s great to test all this shit out.
Of course, Chris is wrong about Sayles, but I won’t blame his “Britishness” as much as other weaknesses in his character. And Mauer–I do believe there’s a picture of him next to “churlishness” in the dictionary. (It’s either churlishness or consumptive, I forget which.) Me, I’m Mary fucking Worth, I bring so many people together.
As a personable well-mannered humanist with an open and purportedly well-educated mind I am always in favor of quietly observed, tolerant, competently directed, character-driven explorations of the forces—esp. class— that shape and drive people apart. In the darkest heart of my movie Id I wish for violence like an Italian zombie movie, spectacular set pieces of carnage and destruction, razor sharp cynicism, dizzying montage, bad behavior, stylistic force, the cinematic disembowelment of the whole sickening everyday world and the forces that shape It.
Is Arnab in Bombay? Should we be worried? Should someone try to go get him and Sunhee and bring thm home?
(i am in delhi–leave for ladakh (between kashmir and tibet) tomorrow. thanks for the concern.)
since chris shares my opinion of leigh, down to favorite leigh film, i will try to expedite his rise to full-time blogger on return from ladakh. however, i cannot share his opinion of sayles and so will not expedite his rise to full-time blogger on return from ladakh. but i won’t say more about sayles here, except to say i really liked “limbo”, “men with guns” and “lone star” but found “silver city” and especially “sunshine state” to be chores.
I read that Naked will be receiving the full Criterion treatment in September or October (with introductions from Neil Labute, a Leigh interview conducted by Will Self, and a back-from-the-dead audio commentary from Katrin Cartledge)! Sounds joyous. To buy or not to buy?
Katrin Cartlidge – known best through Mike Leigh’s films – gets a bit of a belated tribute here:
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,14931-2236325,00.html