Album Reviews
Movies
Concert Reviews

Top 10
Resources
Contact Us

If you think your life is in a rut and going nowhere, try watching over two hours of Mike Leigh's latest film, All or Nothing. It is a grim slice of lower-class British life in nondescript flats with dead end jobs. Leigh works a Robert Altman-type story with a main plot and side stories, however, we are left dangling as to the fate in two stories which gives this premium film an unfinished glaze. Leigh did Topsy Turvy of a few years back, which featured the colorful life of Gilbert and Sullivan. This time, the cast of All or Nothing is clothed in grey, gray and gr-ray.

Timothy Spall (Secrets & Lies) is Phil, a cab driver with soft demeanor and softer heart. His wife, Penny (Leslie Manville) is a small woman with a sharp tongue that she uses against Phil and overweight teenage son, Rory (James Corden.) Overweight daughter, Rachel (Alison Garland), keeps in the background by reading and literally fading into the woodwork. Penny is a checker at a supermarket while Rachel is a cleaning woman in a home for the aged. Hapless Rory doesn't have a job, much to the chagrin of the family. Their friends are kindly Maureen (Ruth Sheen), who irons clothing at home, and her teen daughter who has a bruiser for a boyfriend. Sex is just something to while away the hours. Then, there is alcoholic Carol who hasn't had a clear thought in years, her hot-tempered cab driver husband and their over-sexed teen daughter. All inhabitants of a housing development with an invisible "condemned" on it. We go through the day with these people who have little hope other than to meet the bills at the end of the week. This is where the film plods. The audience doesn't need one more supper table argument or one more watch Rory flop on the sofa or drunken Carol weave around the complex. It is when tragedy strikes that we see everyone’s backbone. It's like wiping grime from an old window and seeing the sun for the first time.

Timothy Spall has the type of face and haircut that speak eons of survival. Here is a man who stays away from the sparks between mother and son, and bonds quietly with his daughter, both observers of the human condition. Leslie Manville gives Penny a whipped look and she has a similar body stance to Jennifer Aniston in The Good Girl, a straight-backed determination to make it through just one more day. From riding her bike through traffic to going to a karaoke bar with Carol and Maureen, Penny looks the same. Defeated. It takes a good actress to achieve this effortlessly.

One's heart opens to the story of Maureen and her daughter, but this story is not complete. Nor is the one between Carol and her daughter, where alcoholism reigns in the home. Of interest are the passengers Phil picks up in his cab. This is a microcosm of humanity from the idle rich to the idle poor. The dispatch station itself is a far cry from the old television show, Taxi.

All or Nothing is not a perfect film. I got interested in Carol and Maureen, but to no avail. Carol's daughter has a pseudo-stalker for a friend, but this story goes nowhere. Phil's cab driver friend, also Carol's husband, is a car accident person and that's where we leave him, sort of by the side of the road in life. Phil is slowly sliding downhill and you want to grab him by his wrinkled collar and say, "Snap out of it!" As for Penny, a fast "Stuff it" would do. Oh, Mike Leigh can certainly wring pathos out of a few apartments on a quiet street. I wonder what he would do with your town?

Copyright 2002 Marie Asner
Submitted 11/6/02