New to video this week, Secrets and Lies offers the neophyte a painless and rewarding introduction to the distinctive work of offbeat British writer/director Mike Leigh. Leigh has been active in British television and cinema for 25 years but has largely been confined to cult status on this side of the Atlantic, mostly in communities served by more discriminating video stores. Nominated for five Academy Awards this spring, Secrets and Lies has finally catapulted Mike Leigh into the North American mainstream.
Nobody else makes films quite like Leigh does. They tend to revolve around a series of common themes: the slow death of British working class life; how people in families tend to destroy each other; the monstrous side of human nature; and—potentially most disturbing—how utterly hilarious all of the above can be, provided you’ve a mind to see it that way. A visit to a Mike Leigh film is a visit to the post-Thatcher human zoo, a place where budget cuts have forced the keepers to mix incompatible species together in cages, where they all drive each other crazy.
Leigh’s films are also largely collaborative efforts: for the most part, he and his stock company of actors come up with the whole script in rehearsal. They will start with a basic idea or theme, improvise around it for weeks or months, expanding and polishing characters and action. Then Leigh writes it down as a conventional script, everybody goes in front of the cameras, and they make a movie.
This way of doing things tends to produce movies for actor-watchers rather than plot-watchers; films where feelings and emotions are more important than narrative. Watching the final product is sometimes unnerving; like being invited to observe a two-hour experiment in which the lunatics are invited not only to run the asylum, but to write the rules and design the therapy as well. You are never unaware that something very different from your average Hollywood script is unspooling before you.
The strength of this process is—when the experiment comes off successfully—that you are presented with the kind of characters which rarely come from a screenwriter hunched alone over a typewriter. When it doesn’t work—and there are places in all of his films when it doesn’t—you get characters who the natural-selection process of normal scriptwriting would have consigned to extinction. It’s as if both actor and director fall prey to Stockholm syndrome during those months they’re locked up together, and some material sticks around that really should have been spiked. You also get storylines that are pretty whacked out—or at most a provisional actors’ aid: characters show up, get into each other’s way, and people cry.
All of the above are on display in Secrets and Lies. Secrets and Lies was the winner of the 1996 Palm D’or at Cannes (which it didn’t entirely deserve) and Brenda Blethyn won the award for best actress (which she deserved in spades). It is perhaps Leigh’s most conventional and accessible film to date, even having what could be described as a plot: Hortense—middle-class, black and cultured—when her adoptive mother dies decides to search for her biological family. Her pursuit leads her ultimately to Cynthia—working-class, white, unstable and completely unprepared for this intrusion from her past, particularly for the unflattering light it throws on her current unhappy life.
As you might have guessed from the title, Secrets and Lies is a movie about families, silence and untruth being simultaneously the glue that holds them together, and what makes life within them miserable. This is not exactly a startlingly fresh insight into the human condition, (“We’re all in pain,” Cynthia’s brother complains, “why can’t we share our pain?”) but it’s a thoroughly reliable starting point for great bits of actor-business, and actor-business is what the man’s movies are all about.
The most brilliant, ferocious piece of actor-business in a Mike Leigh film was rendered by David Thewlis in 1993’s Naked—another performance honoured by the Cannes festival. Thewlis—who looks like a drowned rat that somebody’s had a go at with a pair of garden shears—plays Johnny, a borderline psychotic and paranoid philosopher who cuts a swath through the lives of his ex-girlfriend and a half-a-dozen others one ugly weekend. Naked is a comedy—or at least there are some set-pieces that are as insanely funny as anything you're going to see on a screen this year—and yet it's also the bleakest movie you may ever have laid eyes on. Naked is what you might call kitchen-toilet drama; think of a Tom Stoppard-scripted evening of bear-baiting and you’ll get some idea of what you’re in for.
Thewlis later reported that he approached nervous-breakdown territory on the set of Naked, and you get a sense of that kind of actor commitment throughout the Leigh canon. Life is Sweet, High Hopes, Abigail’s Party and (if your video shop is particularly zealous) half a dozen other Leigh titles together offer more dedicated, interesting performances than we are likely to get from a year’s worth of Hollywood product.
To venture through Mike Leigh’s back catalogue is more often than not to glimpse the best of what low-budget filmmaking can be; to have a tantalizing look at what a cinematic universe would be like if the players in the drama had to do all those mundane things like developing plot and narrative, and actually coming up with their own words. As you might expect, it’s a wild and anarchic place with flights of profundity and dead ends butted up against one another.
And yet it all has the inescapable feeling of reality to it: in the lives we actually live, we too are actors in a sometimes bleak comedy that has no writer. Mike Leigh makes films the way we live our lives—making it up as we go along, on a modest budget, and with a lot of help from our friends. His is the cinema of human solidarity.
—Published in the Globe and Mail, 1996
No comments:
Post a Comment