Mike Leigh’s new film – perhaps his last – is a poignant, intergenerational drama of happy-sad acceptance that life goes on, until it doesn’t go on. And then you have to come to terms with the mortality of your elderly parents and by that same token, with the end that is waiting for you too. The decency and clarity of the film are a tonic.
It is a movie with one of Leigh’s overtly positive and even sugary titles, like Life Is Sweet (1990) or Happy-Go-Lucky (2008), as distinct from his darker ones: Secrets & Lies (1996) or Hard Truths (2024). But his sweet titles are not simply satirical and intended to mean the opposite: it is more complicated and elusive, and even the contrast here between the two heroines’ private and professional lives isn’t straightforwardly a matter of irony. As so often, the dialogue has that unique Leigh cartoonish quality that isn’t caricature, and the characters often speak with an almost wartime chirpiness in a world of peckers kept up and noses kept clean.
This is a perkiness that the thirtysomethings have unexpectedly inherited and modified from their old mum and dad, and Leigh leaves it to the audience to judge the consequent tone of the drama and the appropriate tone of their response. The setting is Ealing, west London, where, to paraphrase Larkin, people work all day and get half drunk at night, opening up the white wine that’s been in the fridge while worrying about themselves and their family. Rosie (Alice Bailey Johnson) is a single woman and social worker who has started dating a fireman (no woke stuff about “firefighter”).
She stays calm and polite in the face of aggressive behaviour from clients; her first scene is with an impassive old man in hospital who, asked for his address, recites only a number. He is perhaps a kind of choric spirit in the film, like the homeless man in Jack Rosenthal’s The Chain. Rosie, as caring in private as she is at work, has welcomed her best friend back into the spare room in her flat; this is Amy (Kate O’Flynn), a fellow social worker who cares specifically for vulnerable young people.
She needs a place to stay as she has just split up with an odious boyfriend. The two women are deliriously happy to have each other’s company again: they drink, sing daft songs and tell goofy jokes together. Another type of movie would suggest that each woman is the love of the other’s life, and that they are in denial.
Rosie and Amy are just best pals and the tension and the unresolved issues lie elsewhere. In a way, Amy’s only other mates are her mum and dad, for which we have excellent and heartbreaking performances from Leigh stalwarts Marion Bailey and Paul Jesson, who was Turner’s elderly father in Mr Turner (2014). Rosie and Amy go round to see them together for cups of tea, and Amy’s mum unselfconsciously calls Rosie her “second daughter”.
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