All Or Nothing (2002)
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Movie Reviews of All Or Nothing (2002)
Movie Review: Top Notch
Summary: 5 Stars
Difficult, but very much worthwhile ensemble piece from British director and all around film genius Mike Leigh.The story, as it is, revolves around a group of people living virtually hand to mouth in a London housing project. The class consciousness of British society, as it so often is in Leigh films, is on full display here as is the absolute top notch acting another mainstay of Leigh movies.
This isn't the best movie in Leigh's cannon, but it speaks volumes about Leigh and his vision that even one of his "lesser" films still warrants five stars.
Movie Review: Mike Leigh is always interesting
Summary: 4 Stars
Even when making a film about astonishingly uninteresting people. The lives portrayed here are as going nowhere as lives can possibly be. Yet though bleak, it is not depressing, for it is the response to those circumstances that separate the successful from the failures. Dale Carnegie would be challenged to maintain a positive attitude in this discouraging environment, and yet Leigh once again demonstrates that life is in the control of those who choose to control whatever it is they have to control. The story ostensibly watches the lives of Penny and Phil, moldering in a low-income housing project with individual lives that contain nothing to look forward to and nothing at all to share. Leigh uses some of his favorite actors, the brilliant Lesley Manville (who shone even in the incredibly bright Topsy-Turvy) as Penny, and the most underrated performer around today, Timothy Spall. Penny is a middle-aged mother who is trying to hold up three very heavy lives, and she is crushed by the burden. Bitter and recriminative, she cannot fathom why she has so little. Phil has allowed himself to become an observer to all life, even his own, and in the process finds he too has nothing left. Their two children are fat, lonely, uneducated, and going nowhere. If you knew what was going to happen to you during the day, you wouldn't get up, says Phil. And he doesn't. Until the epiphany that has to save him from the self-destruction rampant around him arrives, and he does indeed start to get up. Like many in the world, Phil is waiting, waiting for salvation to arrive. But only he can create it for himself. And when he does, Penny can join him, and they can look forward with a sense of togetherness.
The actors are all brilliant...Leigh seems incapable of filming a boring performance. James Corden, who was hysterical in the never-seen Whatever Happened to Harold Smith? deserves special mention here. His brooding, angry, wastrel is one of the saddest characters I've ever seen. His life is out of control in every way, and he is overwhelmed by his inability to understand why. He has no language skills but is reduced to swearing and punching, yet hits as ineffectually as he speaks. The lost soul is common in Leigh; but no one is more lost than Rory. But he has a loving family to support him. Now he needs to grab his opportunity and make himself something closer to a person.
Naked was the story of a man who understood language and used it brilliantly, yet still had a miserable life. But those who cannot speak cannot really think, and the lives of those who cannot think do not make good cinema. There is not quite enough in the interiors of these losers to hold this film together. The overall effect, while poignant, carries less weight than Leigh's great films, Topsy-Turvy, Secrets & Lies and Life Is Sweet. While better than nearly everything out there, the weaknesses and inarticulateness of each character cannot carry the story.
Movie Review: Camus, Kafka, and Mitch Leigh
Summary: 4 Stars
Mitch Leigh is a filmmaker to watch. He can explode a screen like Baz Luhrman with color and music as in TOPSY TURVY, explore delicate regions of human behavior as in SECRETS AND LIES and can still retain the ability to seek out the slender thread of simply living day to day as is ALL OR NOTHING. For a two hour plus film, Leigh is able to hold our attention like a biologist with a microscope while he slowly follows the impossibly boring vacuum of life that his characters live in this wan, bleak look at life in the working class Brits. Everyone seems alienated from relating to people except on the most raw basis of despair and struggle. The family of focus is four sad creatures with utterly no future until a sudden disruption in their meaningless lives turns on the light of recognition that hppiness occurs only if you find/make it yourself. Leigh has a cast of favorites he continues to use because they are such very fine actors. Timothy Spall finds all the accepted despair and acceptance of a world gone sour in the character of a cab driver who lacks the esteem to support himself in the face of clients who can't pay and a family who can't function beyond minimal requirements of being alive. Lesley Manville as his beleagured wife has internalized any hope that the world in which she is drowning can be any better. Their obese kids are incredibly well defined by James Corden and Alison Garland, and their co-tennants/mates in one of the most depressing housing projects every photographed are cast to a fare-thee-well as families who hold onto life by their own fingernails.
There is a degree of psychological salvation offered at the end of the story which, given the arid desert of lives the characters inhabit, springs like a brief mirage of a transitory oasis. This is not a light movie and it does require a lot from an audience to persevere. But then Mitch Leigh is an honest observor and whether we like the slice of life he exposes or not, he does make us look inward to re-evaluate our own priorities. And that is certainly one criterion for films that remain meaningful past the initial viewing.
Movie Review: Slice of Working-Class Life
Summary: 4 Stars
This is a movie about working class Brits who speak such cockney I had to view with subtitles in order not to miss the mumbling dialogue. It was worth the time, because it had a very unusual feel. It was very slice of life, as I am told most of Leigh's films are. A London cab driver and his supermarket clerk wife raise two fat kids. The daughter works in an old folks home, the son refuses to do anything but watch TV and eat. The parents are numb. The cabbie is depressed and hardly says anything as the son sasses the mother. Other characters include a girl that is pregnant by a violent boyfriend, her mother who had a similar experience, the neighborhood slut that goes after the violent boyfriend next, and her alcoholic parents. Nobody knows who they are or what they want. Finally, the young boy winds up in the hospital with a heart attack and that sort-of brings the family together.
You could call most of the film downbeat. After much worry and tragedy, the film ends on a higher note than it starts, but you don't really feel that their lives have improved. Even though there is a lot of negative emotion, the movie is still compelling like a train wreck. On the strength of this, I would watch any Mike Leigh movie that comes out on DVD.
Movie Review: Thought provoking
Summary: 4 Stars
'All or Nothing' is a fascinating but disturbing portrayal of the lives of struggling working class people in a London tenement. It is a very thought provoking film and may lead to reflecting on your own life and on life in general. As with Mike Leigh's other films this is not very upbeat stuff, in fact this movie is probably more of a downer than the usual from him. The superbly acted characters are real hard luck cases and their lives seem utterly hopeless, so much so that I was expecting someone commit suicide at any moment. But at the same time their story is gripping and so realistic that you feel like a voyeur looking in on them. The ending while not exactly a happy ending provides a slight glimmer of hope but in keeping with the reality of the movie is not overly optimistic. If you like Leigh's other films you will not be disappointed by this one.