All or Nothing
dir. Mike Leigh

Opens Fri Nov 1 at Seven Gables.

Misery is a given in the films of Mike Leigh. His characters wallow in financial and spiritual poverty, emotional starvation, casual cruelty, and social alienation. His stories deal out tiny triumphs in an atmosphere of constant humiliation and unquenched longing. More often than not, however, Leigh's films are also hysterically funny.

The onslaught of misery is tempered with withering humor that both alleviates and exacerbates the misery itself. In earlier films, the combination was drawn to serve the somewhat quaint irony found in titles like Life Is Sweet (in which no one's life is particularly sweet) and High Hopes (in which no one's hopes are particularly high)--the idea being that laughter is the only way to fight through the miserable muck of existence.

As the filmmaker progresses, however, Leigh's misery-humor index has taken on more intriguing metaphysical and metaphorical dimensions. Probably the best example of this dynamic can be found in Secrets & Lies, which places the locus of misery in the sinus cavity of Brenda Blethyn, whose voice in the film is a nauseous whinny, cinched up in a despair so complete that her character becomes both tragic and hilarious. The maudlin grace of Blethyn's performance begs the question that makes Leigh's best work so unsettling: "How can I be laughing at this?"

In his first movie since the breathtaking departure of Topsy-Turvy (2000), Leigh has sidled up to that question once again. Unlike his past work, however, All or Nothing doesn't offer a very satisfying answer.

The terrain of All or Nothing is boilerplate Leigh: The lives of a trio of unattractive, uncommunicative working-class families intersect in a working-class London apartment block. The main family consists of a depressive cab driver (the great Timothy Spall), his mousy domestic partner (Lesley Manville), and their two overweight teenage kids. The father simmers in hopeless lethargy, the mother absorbs their son's mounting hostility, and the daughter, meanwhile, recedes into the wallpaper. Down the hall, we find a single mother and daughter who go through the motions of familial discord while straining not to recognize the degree to which their personalities and destinies seem to be merging. A few doors down, another cabbie and his ravaged wife drink themselves into oblivion while their teenage daughter wrestles with the impulse to become the local slut.

In a film about the lasting, stinging consequences of having children, parents are the primary focus; but it's the kids who bear the brunt of the suffering. One has a heart attack. One has an accidental pregnancy. One becomes invisible. They all are grasping at identities their decentralized families don't provide--the obese son becomes a violent bully, the ignored daughter becomes a man-eater, and so forth.

The adults, meanwhile, grapple inarticulately with the ghosts of faded love and the legacies of forgotten ambitions. The morose cabbie devolves into impotent passivity; his partner (they never even bothered to get married) becomes a martyr to the grind of working, cooking, and her son's anger. The single mother wrestles with shame as her daughter slides into the same mistakes that she made. Everyone in the film struggles with a sense of being unwanted, and worse, unneeded.

Before it's all over, the problems of each household connect to the others like the adjoining walls of the housing complex they inhabit. And while Leigh might once have been satisfied to observe the intertwining nature of each family's strife, and draw some uplifting conclusion from it, there's a sorrow at the bottom of All or Nothing that the characters' tiny triumphs can't match. Problematically, however, the film still employs Leigh's stock juxtaposition of humor and misery, which makes misery's ultimate triumph feel like a kind of betrayal. As in all Leigh's films, the foundation for the humor is in the characters' working-class argot. But between all the "wot"s and "innit"s, there's a ravine of sadness into which all the film's small voices fade.

It may be that Leigh made a conscious choice not to deliver his standard ending. Given the tendency of audiences to condescend to his theatrical working-class heroes--to go in ready to laugh at their funny accents, then weep at their surprising humanity and resilience--such a reversal of expectation might be the healthier, more "real" choice. It's certainly interesting. Unfortunately, though, it's also a colossal bummer, one that reflects the complexity of life with an unfair, undesirable emphasis on the paltriness of existence. The stage is set for emotional catharsis, and it comes, and it is devastating.

But when the fog lifts, you're left not with empathy or even sympathy, but pity, which is a form of contempt. That contempt changes the usual Leigh question--"How can I be laughing at this?"--to the altogether less rewarding "How much more of this can I take?"