Mike Leigh's All or Nothing is an exhilarating movie about sadness and renewal, set in a London housing project.
It's an unlikely follow-up to Leigh's brilliant Gilbert and Sullivan extravaganza, Topsy Turvy. But in its own way All or Nothing is piercingly musical, too, from the first shot of a girl pushing a mop through the hall of an old-age home while an elderly woman advances toward her slowly, with a cane, resisting help. In lesser hands the material would be dreary. Mike Leigh, both a superb filmmaker and a humanist, grasps the rhythmic beauty of the scene and turns it into a poem on the duty of the young character and the determination of the older one. Leigh has a way of depicting force of habit that accentuates the positive even when what's happening is negative. He makes you sense the untapped capacity for living beneath blank faces and hunched shoulders.
As Leigh observes the comings and goings of three working-class households in an apartment complex, he turns the flirtations and dust-ups in the courtyard into spontaneous choreography - stomps, reels and Apache dances.
Hovering above it all are Timothy Spall and Lesley Manville as an overweight, unsuccessful cab driver and his responsible common-law wife. Their daughter is the girl we've seen at the nursing home, and their son is an obese layabout who growls at his mother and picks meaningless fights.
All or Nothing, on its own modest scale, takes on the Satyajit Ray theme of "the home and the world." It hinges on people's limited involvement in their work. Spall's cabbie can't rouse himself to win the early morning fares to the airport. When he's on the job, one dilemma after another gets him down. Is it right to charge an aging gent the company minimum, even for a one-block ride? Do you accept the apologies of a sloppy drunk for not paying his fare, or have him thrown in the clink?
Manville, as a cashier at a supermarket, gears her day for maximum efficiency and earning-power: She strikes a gallant figure riding home on a bike while her best pal, Ruth Sheen, pays for the bus. Sheen, an actress with a luminous life force, plays a single mother who takes in ironing on the side. Yet Sheen, unlike Manville, still has the energy to be the most high-spirited gal at the karaoke bar. No scene in current movies is more elating than Sheen's Big Bird of a woman belting out "Don't It Make My Brown Eyes Blue?"
