High Hopes
February. 24,1989 PGSlice-of-life look at a sweet working-class couple in London, Shirley and Cyril, his mother, who's aging quickly and becoming forgetful, mum's ghastly upper-middle-class neighbors, and Cyril's pretentious sister and philandering husband. Shirley wants a baby, but Cyril, who reads Marx and wants the world to be perfect, is reluctant. Cyril's mum locks herself out and must ask her snooty neighbors for help. Then Cyril's sister Valerie stages a surprise party for mum's 70th birthday, a disaster from start to finish. Shirley holds things together, and she and Cyril may put aside her Dutch cap after all.
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Reviews
This is a must-see and one of the best documentaries - and films - of this year.
I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.
Blistering performances.
A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.
Mike Leigh is always good value at the low-budget end, appealing to lefties and loonies alike. It's interesting how this picture has dated in the 21 years since 1988. The main couple, hash-smoking drop-outs Cyril (Philip Davis) and Shirley (the charming Ruth Sheen) both have proper jobs they can live on, for example, instead of half-starving on three. They are glad-handed with strangers, something else that has been eroded. On the other hand, Cyril's elderly mum (Edna Doré) is depicted having little or no social services, which paradoxically would probably not apply today. There are no immigrants or brown faces in the picture, which now looks very strange. Given these changes, the picture takes a round swipe at the Yuppies of the 80s, who brashly moved into lower-class areas and gentrified them. The gulf between Mum's people and her neighbours (Lesley Manville & David Bamber) is deep and wide, and still prevails on the tight little island of Albion. It all comes out when Cyril's social-climbing sister's hysterical laughter turns into tears of misery, frustration and defeat: a fine filmic moment. Definitely worth a look for social comedy fans.
The title of Mike Leigh's first film was "Bleak Moments" and he's been having them, on and off, ever since. Leigh's films are the comedic equivalent of the Theatre of Cruelty. The pain running through a Mike Leigh movie far outweighs anything 'funny'. You wonder why they are called comedies at all. And the pain is usually the pain of belonging to a family unit. In "High Hopes" the family unit is Edna Dore's almost catatonic London pensioner, her appalling daughter Valerie and her equally appalling husband Martin and her son Cyril and his partner Shirley. Dore's next-door neighbours are a couple of Sloane Rangers with a double-barreled name and if Leigh has a fault it's that he can't help lampooning Valerie and Martin and the snooty neighbours. (Valerie is a clone of the awful Beverly in "Abigail's Party"). These are cartoon characters and they don't ring true.However Dore, who does virtually nothing, is quietly magnificent as the mother whose life has evaporated in front of her eyes and Philip Davis and Ruth Sheen are heartbreakingly real as the socialist son and the woman he loves but not enough to give her the child she craves. Indeed, Davis and Sheen give the kind of performances that seem to transcend mere 'acting' and which in a just world would be showered with prizes. (Sheen and Dore did win European Film Awards). In fact, everyone is first-rate even the caricatured neighbours and the lamentable Valerie. An uneven work, then, but when Davis and Sheen are on screen it's as good as Leigh gets.
To watch a movie like this again - I saw it on release and now it's a freebie with a Broadsheet - is to wonder aloud why Mike Leigh, who proves here that he CAN write an Original screenplay, felt compelled to rip off Chabrol's Une Affaire des femmes in Vera Drake. Like much, if not all of Leigh's output this is an ensemble piece and if the labels on each character are writ in Bold Face - Socialist brother, Capitalist sister, Yuppie couple etc - that's just a minor flaw in Leigh's make up, he is, after all, firmly entrenched in the Ken Loach anti-Capitalist camp but unlike Loach he does remember to entertain the audience and not just preach at them. This movie revolves around a fragmented family; brother Cyril is so steeped in Socialism that he is allowed to make schoolboyish statements like 'the day they machine gun the Royal Family is the day I'll wear a tie', whilst sister Valerie is heavily into conspicuous consumption and their old mum is slowly descending into a twilight world of short-term memory loss and confusion. Mum still lives alone in the house she's presumably occupied all her married life and where the brother and sister have been raised but the once run-down neighborhood is going up-market so the yuppie couple next door comprise a third couple. This is primarily a vehicle for an ensemble cast and each actor takes his own particular ball and runs with it whilst the director juggles those same balls. It was perhaps a mistake to let Heather Tobias play not only Abigail from Abigail's Party but play it in the style of Leigh's ex-wife Alison Steadman who created the role of Abigail but against that there will be younger viewers who never saw Abigail's Party. The sequences involving Jason Watkins peter out not quite half way through which raises the question of what they were doing there in the first place. The biggest negative is that the film is primarily a study of 'North London' types (Breaking And Entering uses the same locale)and other North Londoners will recognise and possibly sneer at themselves and their friends/neighbors but it's difficult to know what they'd make of it in Leigh's native Salford. If you like fine acting you came to the right place but if you like taut, well-made screenplays chances are you'll be disappointed.
The life and times of an extended family in 1980's London.Director Mike Leigh is probably the closest the UK has to Woody Allen: and like Allen his films go from absolute classics to barely watchable. Here he is about as good as he ever will be - indeed there are scenes from this movie that are, in there own way, as profound and original as anything that has been put down on film.Who else would let the camera linger on the face of an old woman just at the point of losing her sanity? Or dare to present a couple going nowhere as the centrepiece of a feature film? Or even present "success stories" (a yuppie couple) as rank and selfish? Here lower-middle-and-upper crusts are clowns, it is only a matter of levels and angles.Indeed, Leigh never gives us anything to cling to. Nor does he want to present hope that things will change for the better. Take the central couple Shirley and Cyril (Philip Davies and Ruth Sheen). Why are they living like squatters in their own tiny flat? Why can they not buy a proper bed (they sleep on the floor) or look for somewhere better - after all they both work? Apart from the question of a child (she wants - he doesn't) they both seem happy to live in squalor. In Shirley we at least have someone who cares for other people.The old lady - through which the story is told - is on her last legs as regards living an independent life. The house she lives in has become neglected and the area she lives in no longer contain her type of people. Her neurotic daughter is so wrapped up in her own suburban life that she does seem to realise her mother is at the point of collapse. The scene where she holds a birthday party for her aged mother is agony - not for her confused mother - but for us the viewer.Some of the performances are a little of the top (Leigh's films let actors improvise) and I could have lived without so much of the melancholy music track that rubs everything in. But this is the only film since One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest that lets humour and tragedy sit side by side without blinking.Director Leigh gets under your skin and takes you places we haven't been on film before - but I am not sure they are places I would want to go on a regular basis. He is a one-off, but I am secretly glad about that.