Life on the borderline

All or Nothing

Cert 18, 128 mins

Love and loneliness are the themes of Mike Leigh's new film - like many of Mike Leigh's earlier films. The scene, too, will be familiar: a Greenwich housing estate, surveyed with Mass Observation detail, over one ordinary weekend. It holds you. Even its opening minute or two, when nothing happens, no one speaks, holds you. A fat teenage girl mops the corridor in an old people's home, wrapped up in herself, perhaps a little too intense.

She's Phil's daughter, Rachel ( Alison Garland). Phil (Timothy Spall) is a minicab driver, just scraping by, dredging the sides of chairs for small change, seeing a lot of suffering life in the rear-view mirror of his cab. Home life is quietly desperate, too.

His industrious wife, Penny (Lesley Manville), works a checkout at the local Safeway, does crosswords for prizes as bedtime reading, and is the mainstay of household and husband. Their children are another matter, especially unemployed Rory (James Cordon), an obese couch potato who turns away from the dinner table to eat his meal on his lap and watch the telly: pigs are livelier.

These are people who talk, but don't communicate; who look, but don't see; who feel, but can't express themselves. Amazing how Leigh, using his customary workshop "development" technique to let individual actors elaborate characters, fascinates us with the ordinary.

Some critics say he lacks sympathy; they want warm human stresses to show the director cares. Maybe it's part of Leigh's own ethnic debt to Eastern Europe, but he has brought to British film-making that sense of observation void of false sentiment which the great Russian novelists possessed."Possessed" is the word here: every character is possessed by something in their nature - or, simply, their neighbours'.

The latter are a grim crowd: alcoholic-Carol (Marion Bailey) belting out karaoke at the pub on tottery legs; her cab driver husband, Ron (Paul Jesson), a fly-boy turned sloth and slob; up-beat single mum Maureen (Ruth Sheen), who even does laundry with optimism - one of those people who turn life's chores into cheerful demos.

The neighbours' daughters, waitress Donna (Helen Coker) and on-the-make Samantha (Sally Hawkins), have the belligerency of youth in their bony figures and painted faces. A couple of hangers-around, swaggering and uncouth Jason (Daniel Mays) and lurking and masochistic Craig (Ben Crompton), occasionally confront each other while eyeing the girls. A tree stands in the middle of the courtyard, looking worn out. Like the lives around it.

When future generations want to see how part of Britain lived, All or Nothing is the film they will look at. It's about people inhabiting a spiritual Marshalsea, a debtors' prison, because they can't cope. Their potential is not switched on and they have expended all they've got. It's distressing, yes: and there is a certain element of discomfort that Leigh's critics will likely seize on at being let into such lives and invited to visit such homes without being asked to shell out sympathy.

"Patronising" is a word I've heard. I don't share that reaction. There's a lot of humour in it, some at the expense of characters, but also much that the characters make for themselves on the unexpectedly broad emotional canvas of their cramped condition. Mostly they can't phrase their feelings. The film articulates for them.

Several cast members praise Leigh in interviews for putting people on screen who are "magnificent in their feelings". I think they are deceiving themselves, possibly due to their own "magnificent" workshop creativity. They reveal their feelings, yes: but seldom raise their pitch to a level higher than quiet desperation.