Second time around with another vintage Mike Leigh. Since High Hopes (1988) the working class has been evicted from their townhouses and corralled into the projects. Ruth Sheen works at the supermarket with Lesley Manville. Both are fantastic though Manville sometimes gets too close to Blenda Blethyn's performance in Secrets and Lies (1996) for my comfort. She has two children with the very stable cab-driving Timothy Spall who mumbles his way to greatness; he shares a fantastic slow-burning scene with notional-Frenchwoman Kathryn Hunter (one of a montage of cab riders) and a tragicomic fundraising round with his family. Sally Hawkins is so young here. Mostly it's a bunch of character studies — Spall and Manville picking up where Sheen and Phil Davis left off in 1988 — until a crisis brings the stakes into sharp relief.
I have a feeling that Leigh pushed the winning formula a bit too far this time and perhaps he felt the same way; his next effort was Vera Drake (2004).
Roger Ebert: four stars. The final scene brings that dominant positive emotion of the twenty-first century, relief. A Critic's Pick by A. O. Scott. Lots of swearing. Four stars from Peter Bradshaw and a ranking of the caricatures.
