Search results
Mike Leigh may well be Britain's greatest living film director; his worldview has permeated our national consciousness. This book gives detailed readings of the nine feature films he has made for the cinema, as well as an overview of his work for television. Written with the co-operation of Leigh himself, it challenges the critical privileging of realism in histories of British cinema, placing the emphasis instead on the importance of comedy and humour: of jokes and their functions; of laughter as a survival mechanism; and of characterisations and situations that disrupt our preconceptions of ‘realism’. Striving for the all-important quality of truth in everything he does, Leigh has consistently shown how ordinary lives are too complex to fit snugly into the conventions of narrative art. From the bittersweet observation of Life is Sweet or Secrets and Lies, to the blistering satire of Naked and the manifest compassion of Vera Drake, he has demonstrated a matchless ability to perceive life's funny side as well as its tragedies.
the Lion, as well as producing a play called God’s Jailer, which he apparently came across in the school library. At the same time he was writing, directing and performing in revues for Habonim, the Zionist socialist youth movement, which provided him with most of his social life. He was also developing his skills as a cartoonist; an interesting talent in the light of his later reputation as a caricaturist. Whitehead_01_Chps.indd 11 29/3/07 15:53:04 12 mike leigh Staying on, without much enthusiasm, for A levels in Art, History and English, he was unsure what
gave him carte blanche to follow his usual working methods through a six-month rehearsal period, with the unusual result that until a matter of days before it opened, the piece could only be advertised as a ‘New Play by Mike Leigh’, since he was still evolving it with his chosen cast. Not that this lack of information seemed to worry anyone, since Two Thousand Years, as it was eventually titled, was sold out for its entire run – some 16,000 advance tickets – over two weeks before the opening night. In the event, previews were delayed by a couple of days while Leigh
put on their coats before leaving, a more wistful, rather melancholy (and non-diegetic) tune takes over. This bridges the cut to a medium shot of the North London house where Wendy lives with her husband Andy (Jim Broadbent) and their twin daughters, Nicola (Jane Horrocks) and Natalie (Claire Skinner). Wendy is the hub of the family. She is also a good teacher: as the Whitehead_01_Chps.indd 75 29/3/07 15:53:15 76 mike leigh screenplay puts it, she is ‘more concerned with getting the girls to express themselves and to enjoy the rhythm than with anything formal
:53:11 58 mike leigh widowed mother (Edna Doré), whom he worries about and occasionally visits, though clearly not often or for long. Mrs Bender still lives in the family home, one of the few council tenants left in what is now a very middle-class area (‘They buy these houses for sod all’, says Cyril. ‘They sell ’em for a fortune’). She no longer knows any of her neighbours, is unable to get about easily and has little discernible life beyond her domestic routine. She seems rather older than her seventy years, tired, confused and vaguely irritable. The film frequently
, and Cynthia has never been invited to visit the house in which they have lived for almost a year. ‘I suppose we’d have to invite Cynthia as well’, says Monica as they discuss the possibility of having Roxanne round to celebrate her birthday, adding waspishly, ‘There’s no show without Punch’. Maurice responds evenly that he is sure Cynthia would like to see their home. ‘Oh, I’m sure she would!’ replies Monica meaningfully, to which Maurice merely replies, Whitehead_01_Chps.indd 115 29/3/07 15:53:22 116 mike leigh ‘She can’t help it’. Tactfully he compliments
. Their boss (Christopher Martin) enters and asks Pat for ‘two million copies’ of a document. Seeing that she is genuinely nonplussed, he relents and admits that he wants a single copy. And here, less than five minutes into Bleak Moments, we have had Leigh’s first example of a joke that fails, that simply does not function as a joke: Pat doesn’t get it; Sylvia looks bored and vaguely contemptuous; the boss himself does not even seem Whitehead_01_Chps.indd 19 29/3/07 15:53:05 20 mike leigh to think it very funny. He follows this up with another witticism, saying that
again) may well have seemed small consolation. Nevertheless, the critical reaction was on the whole extremely favourable. Richard Schickel found it ‘one of the year’s more beguiling surprises’,3 while Philip French applauded the look of the film, the ‘wonderful ensemble cast’ and the ‘consistently elegant and funny’ Whitehead_01_Chps.indd 147 29/3/07 15:53:27 148 mike leigh dialogue.4 Reviewing the film for Sight and Sound, Andy Medhurst admired the ‘rich and complex’ staging, the ‘typically judicious balance of heartbreak and farce’ and ‘several diamond
Introduction: ‘You’ve gotta laugh’ Mike Leigh may well be Britain’s greatest living director. Without question, he has carved a unique niche for himself: describe a person or a situation as being like someone or something ‘out of a Mike Leigh film’, and few would fail to understand what you meant (which would probably be a small-scale domestic drama involving trapped, yet highly idiosyncratic, suburban characters). And yet, when his most recent film Vera Drake was released in 2005, thirty-four years after his debut feature, Peter Bradshaw was able to claim in a
offer of a trip to the pub; she simply does not want to be in his company. ‘Why don’t you get up earlier in the mornings?’ she says when he asks to borrow money from her. ‘Drive people to work, take ’em to the airport?’ ‘Yeah, know what you mean’, he replies, rather uselessly. Trying to rebuild some kind of rapport, he asks for a clue to the crossword in her magazine (and one cannot help wondering whether Leigh, as a great film buff, was mischievously recalling the Whitehead_01_Chps.indd 163 29/3/07 15:53:29 164 mike leigh scene in Brief Encounter where a wife