Mike Leigh has been nominated for an Academy Award seven times and has won it zero times. He has a Palme d’Or, a Golden Lion, five decades of films that taught generations of actors what unglamorous truth looks like and one of the most distinctive bodies of work in modern British cinema. What he does not have is an Oscar — and based on the reviews and reactions out of the Telluride Film Festival, where the film bowed Friday night, it’s about damn time he got one.
At 83, and contending with myosotis, a muscle-wasting condition that kept him from his own Telluride premiere, Leigh has said this is most likely his last film. Bleecker Street opens it Dec. 4 after a fall festival run the industry reserves for titles it takes seriously. That makes the season’s obvious question unavoidable: What should the Academy do with Mike Leigh’s final film?
The answer is not — give him an Oscar because he is 83. It is — watch the movie, and you’ll see why you’d want to. It is vintage Leigh — wry, melancholy, humane, alert to the small emotional humiliations that become, over the course of a life, the events that define us.
Kate O’Flynn’s Amy anchors it — an Emmy nominee for “Widow’s Bay,” and when the trophies are handed out Sept. 14, very possibly a winner — a social worker steadying a father in decline, gutted by a breakup and kept upright by wine and by Rosie, the live-wire best friend played exquisitely by Alice Bailey Johnson. Marion Bailey, as Amy’s mother, has already emerged from Telluride as a standout, a veteran thespian never given her proper due. A film about the daily labor of caring for people, made by a filmmaker who has spent 50 years caring, without vanity, about the interior lives most movies never bother to notice.
It’s a perfect bookend to a career — and it closes on perhaps the most haunting final shot of any film in a decade. There’s a smaller bookend folded inside it, too: Leigh gave O’Flynn her first job, on “Happy-Go-Lucky,” at 21. She returns for his last.
That sets up a campaign with an unusual shape and real vigor. Leigh carries the legacy narrative, but the film has to prove first that the work is competitive in a year crowded with filmmakers nursing overdue stories of their own. So the cleanest argument for Leigh is historical, not sentimental.
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