Satire on Margaret Thatcher’s Britain; especially upon palliative job creation schemes that even government ministers did not delude themselves into thinking would be anything but.
A boring life is on the dole so often leads to the devil making work for such idle hands. Examples include casual racism, alcoholism, domestic violence and drug addiction. The characters mostly choose to run away from their problems; while the problems of the unemployed and the unemployable are contrasted with a middle-class family that is materially successful but personally unhappy – largely thorough being childless.
As one would expect from Mike Leigh, this is a character driven drama presenting White middle class people as social snobs. They see the lower class as being fit only for condescension and as having fewer choices than they choose to offer themselves. Because LEIGH also thinks this, he is unable to overcome the very problem he points out, in others, in himself; making this movie deficient of any real solution to a very real problem.
Because the middle class lack any full understanding from experience of the lower class, this begs the question as to why they persist in making half thought out dramas like this. The middle class can well understand themselves, but not others, and that is partly the point here. Lower class actors help the director by fleshing out their roles from their own experience But, the presentation of the poor remains partly enfeebled by the very same patronizing and pretentious attitude being satirized.
The funniest scene in this movie is of a hippy social worker lecturing the poor on his personal philosophy of hatred of capitalism, rather than just arranging for their council house windows to be fixed. The satire here lies in the fact that such people wish to keep the poor beggarly by pretending that ambition for wealth is somehow unnatural. This keeps them crucially in his control since they then remain dependent upon his faux largesse: Like a bad mother unwilling to let her children fly the nest because she is lonely.
The two brothers here are opposites in nature as both go down different paths to grow up. They try to escape the enervating social conditioning that tries to keep wealth unevenly distributed in the land, as well as escape from awful parents who are quite unwilling to teach their offspring effective ethics.
All the actors here are nothing short of brilliant, especially because LEIGH is such a good judge of acting talent and dramatic ability. It is really only the superb acting that makes this drama watchable.
Copyright © 2009 Frank TALKER. Permission granted to reproduce and distribute it in any format; provided that mention of the author’s Weblog (http://franktalker5.blogspot.com/) is included: E-mail notification requested. All other rights reserved.
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