At first you have the impression that All or Nothing is yet another film that taps into British misery and the plight of its stoical working class, and its universe of signs that seems to be an endless source of inspiration for national film-makers: the dysfunctional family, the council state and the dullness of everyday life on the outskirts of first world wealth. However, it quickly becomes clear that there is a director at work here, and the director, Mike Leigh, is much less concerned with creating a sociological treatise than analysing human relations with a profound, compassionate eye. Leigh may at points resort to therapy couch techniques, but his merit is to transcend the social ethos of the film to venture into a much vaster and interesting territory, that is, the human soul.
Watching All or Nothing one trawls through a varied range of emotions: despair, wry humour, solitude, sadness. It's also true that you sometimes feel like Leigh is emotionally blackmailing the audience. But in the end you forgive him for not just pulling, but tugging at your heart strings because you sense he's got his strings attached as well. Leigh is a master of human relations and a great storyteller, even when nothing much 'happens' throughout the film.
In many ways his film is very, very English, but at the same time, he transcends the national stereotype. All or Nothing is almost an Italian neo-realist film, were it not for the less mythic and more conventional narrative structure that the director adopts. The action is set in familiar Leigh territory. Penny (Lesley Manville) works at the checkout of a Safeway branch somewhere in southeast London while her husband Phil (Timothy Spall) makes ends meet as a minicab driver. Their daughter Rachel (the movingly expressive Alison Garland) cleans a home for elderly people while the son Rory (James Corden) idles away and constantly screams at his complaining mother. The family is a picture of sadness: the children are fat, and there is no love or communication between the couple any more. Meanwhile, we also get embroiled in some of their neighbours' lives: the upbeat Maureen, the alcoholic Carol and their neglected children, whose lives are also spent in the same void of urban desolation.
Throughout the film, however, the director offers the viewer consolations. The camera stays with passing characters that in another movie would already have been cut out, allowing us to stray momentarily from the metaphorical desert that is the backbone story. For Leigh, there are no goodies and baddies, and there are no miraculous resolutions or irony in All or Nothing. The absence of cynicism is, in fact, one of the film's major driving forces.
It would be very easy to dismiss All or Nothing as sentimentalist or condescending with working class clichés. That would be missing the point. Leigh just uses an English working class milieu as a departure point to tell us a timeless, borderless tale that refuses to succumb to the compromising trappings of genre.
Reviewed by Antonio Pasolini
Reader comments about All or Nothing
elizabeth (Email address withheld) writes:
This was a treasure of a film. It left me with questions unanswered but I can fill in the blanks because the characters were so true. You know what will happen to them, almost.
This appears to be a dreary film and is uncomfortable, even distressing at times, but I came away quite cheered. Thanks.
Alasdair Maclean (Email address withheld) writes:
This is the best film I have seen for a very long time. Although it makes some social observations, its core is about the fragility of love, and what its presence or absence can do to our lives. This film is emotionally committed without being mawkish. And it is marvellously acted.
Palash R. Ghosh (Email address withheld) writes:
This was an excellent film, and I actually found it refreshingly free of most of Mike Leigh's usual 'Socialist' cliches about the working-class. My one major complaint about Leigh's films is that his characters seem to live in an Britain that is somehow free of Black or Asian people! (Aside from a few token appearances)
Roman (Email address withheld) writes:
Just a long, let's say VERY long, piece of...not what you think - just NOTHING. I don't really know why I didn't leave somewhere in the very beginning. Guess the reason was the money spent:^) Some moments, though, were pretty good, BUT why make a more than 2 hours long film when you can easily say the same during 30 minutes. Why make it so boring?
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