Love and misery in Mike Leigh’s All or Nothing | Little White Lies

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Love and mis­ery in Mike Leigh’s All or Nothing

15 Nov 2021

Words by Anton Bitel

Two people embracing, a man and a woman, appearing emotional and intimate.
Two people embracing, a man and a woman, appearing emotional and intimate.
The director’s 2002 dra­ma about life on a Lon­don hous­ing estate is a film of bleak moments and occa­sion­al hope.

Writ­ten and direct­ed by Mike Leigh, All or Noth­ing is an ensem­ble film about three house­holds liv­ing on the same Lon­don coun­cil estate. It begins and ends with the focus on Rachel Bas­sett (Ali­son Gar­land), a sto­ical yet sen­si­tive young woman who works as a clean­er at a care home for the elder­ly, who reads in her spare time, and who express­es her immense love very quietly.

This last qual­i­ty she shares with her father Phil (Tim­o­thy Spall), a soft­ly spo­ken, some­times lost-for-words mini­cab dri­ver. With his put-upon, hang­dog demeanour, Phil ten­der­ly observes his pas­sen­gers – who come from all walks of life – and draws philo­soph­i­cal con­clu­sions about the vagaries of exis­tence (“the fick­le fin­ger of fate”, as he puts it). Phil’s de fac­to wife Pen­ny (Les­ley Manville) has drift­ed from him emo­tion­al­ly, and their obese son Rory (James Cor­den) has inher­it­ed his father’s lazi­ness while devel­op­ing his own obnox­ious pugnacity.

Phil is as close to a pro­tag­o­nist as All or Noth­ing gets, and it is one of his rumi­na­tions on the nature of love which lends the film its title. Indeed, love is a key theme here: the love between hus­band and wife; between par­ent and child; between friends and between sib­lings; the appet­i­tive, horny, pow­er-flex­ing love of a teenag­er (Sal­ly Hawkins); the creepy, obses­sive love of a stalk­er (Ben Cromp­ton) or of a harass­er (Sam Kel­ly); the abu­sive, oppor­tunis­tic love of a loaded” young man (Daniel Mays) towards his girl­friend (Helen Cok­er); the fum­bling, des­per­ate­ly needy love of an alco­holic (Mar­i­on Bai­ley); and the more del­i­cate­ly sus­tained habit­u­al love of a long-term couple.

If you’re not togeth­er, you’re alone”, com­ments Phil to one of his cus­tomers, We’re all born alone, you die alone – noth­ing you can do about it.” A deep lone­li­ness runs through the Bas­setts and the neigh­bour­ing fam­i­lies, ampli­fied by a shared fear of mortality.

A group of people seated around a table, eating a meal together.

Leigh’s typ­i­cal film­mak­ing method­ol­o­gy – which involves work­shop­ping ideas with his cast through inten­sive, part­ly impro­vised rehearsals, before con­vert­ing the results into a tight­ly writ­ten screen­play – pays div­i­dends here, as every­one on screen is graced with a real round­ed­ness. Super­mar­ket work­er and sin­gle moth­er Mau­reen (Ruth Sheen), the kind of fig­ure nor­mal­ly over­looked in cin­e­ma, radi­ates gen­eros­i­ty and kind­ness, and even Phil’s mini­cab man­ag­er Neville (Gary McDon­ald) and his call oper­a­tor Dinah (Diveen Hen­ry), essen­tial­ly side char­ac­ters, are grant­ed a delight­ful com­ic moment.

Mean­while, on the oth­er side of the class divide, the French art deal­er Cécile (Kathryn Hunter), whom Phil picks up as a fare on her way to the opera, is not so much demonised as shown to belong to an alien species, a mere pas­sen­ger in the back­seat of Phil’s life. And yet, on their brief jour­ney togeth­er, these two will still form a brief connection.

Off­set­ting occa­sion­al high hopes with plen­ty of bleak moments, the pri­ma­ry mode of All or Noth­ing is deter­mined­ly mis­er­abilist, with Andrew Dickson’s plain­tive string-and-wood­wind score rather over­selling the pathos. This intro­duces a slight­ly patro­n­is­ing tone to the pro­ceed­ings, as though we are being asked to sym­pa­thise rather than empathise with these char­ac­ters’ trou­bles. But Leigh cuts between and through the poten­tial soap­i­ness of these dif­fer­ent fam­i­ly dra­mas to show a broad­er mosa­ic of the human con­di­tion, defined by birth, death, and all – or noth­ing – that hap­pens in between.

All or Noth­ing is released on Blu-ray, DVD and dig­i­tal plat­forms on 15 Novem­ber via StudioCanal.

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