Mike Leigh makes ordinary complaints funny, then stays long enough for the hurt to become clear. We rate him highly for the people his actors create, though he sometimes explains feelings they have already made plain.
Fi1m perspective
Pansy wakes screaming in Hard Truths (2024), and soon she is finding fault with a baby’s pockets and a dog’s grin. Marianne Jean-Baptiste gives each complaint a logic, however exhausting the company. We laughed at her complaints, then stopped when Leigh showed her back in bed with the duvet pulled to her chin. His patience with people we might otherwise avoid is why we value his films.
That attention to ordinary lives runs from his first feature, Bleak Moments (1971), through the television plays of the 1970s and 1980s. A return to cinema with High Hopes (1988) led to Life Is Sweet (1990), Naked (1993) and Secrets & Lies (1996). With Topsy-Turvy (1999) and Mr. Turner (2014), he took his interest in character into historical settings.
Leigh develops characters through extended improvisation with actors who do not know the full story. With regular cinematographer Dick Pope, Leigh generally keeps the camera unobtrusive, allowing us to watch the actors. In Secrets & Lies, Brenda Blethyn’s nervous, fussing Cynthia can be unreasonable without losing our sympathy. Claire Rushbrook gives Cynthia’s daughter Roxanne enough resistance to keep her mother’s complaints from becoming our only account of the family.
Editor Jon Gregory gives the difficult conversations in Secrets & Lies time to develop, which is essential to their credibility. Leigh occasionally lets them run too long, and Andrew Dickson’s tender music sometimes encourages a feeling Blethyn has already made clear. Even then, the film remains funny and deeply moving because its people can be loving and irritating in the same conversation.
The limitation in Hard Truths is different: David Webber’s Curtley and Tuwaine Barrett’s Moses have so little to say that we learn too little about them. Jean-Baptiste remains reason enough to see it, giving Pansy an intelligence that makes her hostility harder to dismiss. Start with Secrets & Lies, and give its awkward conversations an uninterrupted evening.
Biography
Mike Leigh is an English film and theatre director, writer and former actor. Born on 20 February 1943 in Salford, Greater Manchester, he studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, Camberwell School of Art, the Central School of Art and Design and the London School of Film Technique. He began as a theatre director and playwright in the mid-1960s before making films and television plays.
His films include Bleak Moments (1971), Life Is Sweet (1990), Naked (1993), Secrets & Lies (1996), Topsy-Turvy (1999), Vera Drake (2004), Happy-Go-Lucky (2008), Another Year (2010), Mr. Turner (2014) and Hard Truths (2024), on which he is credited as director and writer. He has received awards including prizes at Cannes, Berlin and Venice film festivals, BAFTA Awards and an OBE.
