All or Nothing (Film)

All or Nothing

(Synopsis & Reviews)

Synopsis:

In a London working-class housing complex, three families try to live out their existence in complacency. Phil (Timothy Spall) is a lackadaisical, uninspired taxi driver who starts working after morning rush hour. His lack of steady income is apparent when he’s forced to search under the sofa cushions for change and borrow cash from his family just to pay his radio rental on time. His longtime partner Penny (Lesley Manville) works at a local supermarket and is showing signs of dissatisfaction with her role in her relationship with Phil and the relationship in general. They have two children: Rory (James Corden), an unemployed who gets into fights with the local kids, and Rachel (Alison Garland), who works maintenance at the local hospital. Penny has three girlfriends who live a few apartments down and go to karaoke night together. Maureen (Ruth Sheen) is happy enough, even though she has to put up with her rude daughter Donna (Helen Coker) and her abusive boyfriend. The other friend is Carol (Marion Bailey), a close-to-ruin alcoholic, whose husband Ron (Paul Jesson) works with Phil at the cab company and whose daughter Samantha (Sally Hawkins) is the local sexpot.

Critics’ Reviews: (#1)

Mike Leigh‘s “All or Nothing” looks behind three doors in a South London public housing estate and finds loneliness, desperation and a stubborn streak of spunky humor. His characters try to remember a time when they were light-hearted and had hope. But there is little to cheer them now, except for food and sleep, the telly, the pub on Saturday night and, for the young, thoughtless sex to hurry them along into raising thankless kids of their own.

Phil Bassett, played by the sad-faced and wounded Timothy Spall, is a minicab driver who stares straight ahead as dramas unfold in his back seat. His common-law wife, Penny (Lesley Manville), is a checkout clerk at the Safeway. They have two fat, unattractive children: Rachel (Alison Garland), who is a cleaner at an old-folks’ home and buries herself in romance novels; and Rory (James Cordon), who lurches from the table to the sofa, his eyes hypnotically fixed on the television, his voice wavering between anger and martyrdom.

Their flat is on an outside corridor of an anonymous housing project, but it has a wooden door with a knocker–a reminder of when they had hopes for it as a home. Now it’s a place where they barely meet. Phil sleeps late, his wife goes to work early, Rachel is in a world of her own and Rory vibrates with hostility. For Penny, there is at least the companionship of neighbors along the corridor; she hangs out with Carol (Marion Bailey) and Maureen (Ruth Sheen), and they go to karaoke night at the pub. Maureen is a single mom whose daughter Donna (Helen Coker) is abused by a boyfriend. Carol, whose husband, Ron, also drives a minicab, is a drunk sliding off into walking hallucinations.

This sounds grim and is grim, but it is not depressing because Leigh, who in his earlier films might have found a few laughs at the expense of his characters, clearly loves these people and cares for them. They are, we realize, utterly without resources; they lack the skills to enjoy life and are trapped on an economic treadmill. Phil has the makings of a philosopher, and observes sadly that you work all day and sleep all night and then you die. When a fellow driver complains of a car crash, Phil looks on the bright side: “You might have driven around the corner and killed a little girl.” The film pays attention to the neighbors, but its main attention is on the Bassetts, and one day something unforeseen happens–I will not reveal what it is–and it acts as a catalyst to jolt them out of their depression and lethargy. It is the kind of bad thing that good things come from. Watch carefully how it happens, and who reacts to it, and how, and you will see that Leigh has made all of the neighbors into characters whose troubles help to define their response.

There are moments in “All or Nothing” of such acute observation that we nod in understanding. Consider the way Maureen learns that Donna is pregnant, and how she deals with the news (at first and then later), and how she treats the boyfriend. Watch joy and beauty flash briefly in the pub when the women are singing. And observe how Timothy Spall goes through an entire life crisis while scarcely saying a word and tells us all we need to know with his eyes.

There is a scene that establishes the Bassett family as well as any scene possibly could. Phil needs to put together a sum of money, and he visits his wife and children separately. He searches for a coin under Rory’s sofa cushion, but Rory finds it and piggishly snatches it. Rachel lends him money as if money is the least of her worries. Penny tries to find out what he is thinking. He keeps repeating that he will pay her back tomorrow. This is his companion of 20 years and he treats her loan like one he would get in a pub.

The closing scenes of the movie are just about perfect. Rory is the center of attention, and notice when, and how, he suddenly speaks in the middle of a conversation about him. When a director gets a laugh of recognition from the audience, showing that it knows his characters and recognizes typical behavior, he has done his job. These people are real as few movie characters ever are. At the end, it looks as if they will be able to admit a little sunshine into their lives and talk to each other a little more. We are relieved. ~ Roger Ebert

Critics’ Reviews: (#2)

Three families struggle to conquer the daily obstacles that life on the breadline continues to hurl at them; some hold their heads high, while others sink irretrievably to the bottom of a dark, hopeless pool of ennui. Dress warm, zip up and bring a flask. We’re going in…

Cab driver Phil (Spall) scratches out a pitiful existence, returning home each evening to a bleak block of council flats where he lives with partner Penny (Manville), and their two lumpish children. Rachel (Garland) is a cleaner at an old folks home, and the source of unwelcome advances from a fellow elderly colleague, while belligerent Rory (Corden) straddles the sofa cushions; chewing snacks and spitting insults, venturing out only to beat on smaller layabouts if they dare touch his football.

Next door, Penny’s pal Maureen (Sheen) is as chirpy as her friend is morose, taking in washing to earn a little extra and riding the rollercoaster that is her daughter Donna’s (Coker) sex life without pausing to scream. Phil’s cabbie acquaintance Ron (Jesson) is having no luck keeping his car in one piece, while wife Marion (Bailey) paddles at the bottom of the nearest bottle, and daughter Samantha (Hawkins) lusts after Donna’s bastard of a boyfriend.

Whereas earlier outing Secrets & Lies dished out an even mix of misery and humour, spoon for spoon, here Leigh allows a flatline woe to wash over us in an unremitting wave of sorrow. There’s no coming up for air save for Mareen’s brief interludes, ever the trooper, albeit trapped in a cycle that her daughter shows every sign of emulating.

Much like a brusque school nurse, one hand on the needle, the other clutching a fistful of dolly mixture, Leigh crams home the bare minimum of sweetness as we howl open mouthed at the all too familiar pain. Here is a director who causes the screen to meld into a mirror as audience face either themselves or recognisable family members; less cinematic escape than spy camera docu-drama.

There are two distinct parties in performance here, albeit knotted tightly together. The parents, led by Spall, have forsaken youthful dreams and now exist in a purely functional present tense, the past set adrift and the future too terrible to contemplate. The children fight and rail against their fate, grabbing what they think might be love (Donna), lusting after another’s happiness (Samantha), or – in the case of Rachel – removing herself from the world entirely, lost in a self embrace that remains the most attractive option amidst isolation and betrayal.

The camera’s obsession with Spall neglects equally inquisitive sub plots, as if we too are being punished for daring to invest emotional sympathy among the remaining cast without including a man one more hardship away from exploding in a shower of grey misery. For the Bassets, renewed hope remains possible at a price they can barely afford, but it’s the unremitting plainness of this no-frills family sponge that causes us to hanker after the icing in the form of spunkier, more lively caricatures.

All or Nothing remains a bracing wake-up-call for British filmmakers (why continue to milk stale genre staples, when your own street is thriving with intrigue and suppressed passion), but the steady plod supplants any form of energised debate with complete and utter exhaustion. ~ Bren

Critics’ Reviews: (#3)

The easiest thing to do in any long-term relationship is to take for granted the fact that you love the other person. When a couple or a family gets caught up in the day-to-day routine of life in each other’s company, it’s bound to happen at some point. People begin to blindly, deafly, and mutely accept each other’s flaws and shortcomings and eventually become numb to them. This numbness eventually starts to show itself in other areas of the relationship, and eventually, instead of working at maintaining the relationship, the pair is simply going through the motions. The family at the center of All or Nothing is well into this process, and Mike Leigh‘s film works so well because we don’t necessarily realize the specifics until the characters do. Once they do, the film completely knocks us flat with its honesty. There’s an extended scene (the film’s penultimate one) in the family’s apartment with a level of verisimilitude that I doubt I’ll ever forget. Yet even with the strength of this central family’s story, Leigh has included studies of two other families, who at first live their own lives in their own world but are then forgotten in the background. Once the film solidifies its focus, the development of the other characters eventually seems forced and unnecessary.

Leigh is well-known for his innovative way of screenwriting. Essentially, he comes up with an outline for the story, assembles a cast, and develops the screenplay from improvisational sessions with them. This theatrical process shows through in many elements of the film. The relationship and interaction between the characters feels more natural, believable, and in-depth. One can only imagine the kind of material a group of actors working with such a range of possibilities could come up with. The film greatly benefits from this process, but it also inadvertently harms it. From the very start, each of these characters has something unique to offer, and Leigh is incredibly comfortable allowing them to develop to a point that we genuinely understand their individual plights. We see how these characters’ lives intertwine, and how a mistake made by one could greatly impact the future of another. Leigh and his cast have created a microcosm of the greater world of the working-class. The structure stumbles near the end once the film focuses on Phil, Penny, and their children. At this point, the film abandons the other characters, for the most part, leaving their individual stories unresolved. Up until this point, we don’t question the need for the development of these characters, but once the film shows its loyalty, there’s no way around it.

The only real reason to question the comprehensive character development is because the central family’s story and dilemma is so strong. The entire film could have rested on their shoulders. At one point in the film, life for the characters comes to a halt as a potential tragedy begins to unfold, and from this point on, the story mainly concentrates on Phil’s family. From then on out, everything that has bubbling under the surface of these characters slowly comes to light. The inciting event is a medical emergency, and since the film is set in England, there is, thankfully, no fighting over the bill. Instead, Leigh concentrates on what this means to his two leads. It’s at this point the couple’s problem is so blatantly apparent. They have taken for granted that they love each other; their relationship centers on complacency. The performances from Timothy Spall and Lesley Manville are superb. Spall spends most of the film loafing around depressed and miserable, but in the penultimate scene, we seem him in a new light. Manville‘s performance is particularly noteworthy for the way she seems completely unhappy and ready to leave it all behind until she’s forced to entertain a most frightening prospect: She’s given her life to someone she hasn’t loved in some time.

Leigh‘s improvisational method of filmmaking pays off royally in the final section of All or Nothing. The final scenes are some of the most powerfully honest I’ve seen in some time. It’s really a shame the other characters aren’t allowed such revelatory moments, but I won’t complain any further. ~ Mark Dujsik

Critics’ Reviews: (#4)

All or Nothing is about a South-East London working class family who do not have the cunning to put on a façade nor the emotional nor educational resources to go about their lives in any other way but the way in which they have been conditioned. They live in a flat on a council estate that is as soulless and impoverished as it is bleak. These people either grind away at each other in barely suppressed hostility, make sly sexual swipes or retreat into inarticulate isolation with few alternatives or solutions to the pressures under which they find themselves. Watching the film is like being a fly-on-the wall to some half-witted sloths on a caged treadmill.

Timothy Spall plays Phil, a mini-cab driver who resembles most a slack-jawed, unshaven, greasy haired, stunned mullet. Penny (Lesley Manville) is his common-law wife who works in a supermarket checkout. Her thin shoulders and drawn face show her dissatisfaction with the way her life has turned out and the daily frustrations and deprivations she must put up with. Their past-school-age children are Rachel (Alison Garland), who works in an old people’s home as a cleaner, and Rory (James Corden), unemployed. Both are overweight, Rachel’s dull apathy and Rory’s belligerent aggression stemming from the same lack of options in their lives.

Some peripheral but well-drawn characters are their neighbours Ron (Paul Jesson), fellow mini-cab driver, his alcoholic wife Carol (Marion Bailey) and their unemployed and insolent daughter Samantha (Sally Hawkins). Samantha hangs provocatively around the estate like a leech in micro shorts waiting for any male to latch on to. Ben Crompton plays a pathetic loser named Craig, who desperately, mutely wants Samantha. His one attempt at articulating his feelings is shockingly extreme but is as sadly ineffective as the rest of his life.

Maureen (Ruth Sheen) is Penny’s co-worker in the supermarket, the Teflon-coated, ever-cheery mother of Donna (Helen Coker) who has an abusive boyfriend named Jason. Their story parallels Phil and Penny’s in that a crisis draws them closer together. Their need for each other can be admitted and they can relate more honestly. Maureen is the one upbeat character in the movie, and apart from Samantha is the only one who can act appropriately in a crisis.

The crisis that affects Phil, Penny, Rachel and Rory causes change but no solution. We know there will be other problems that are caused by one family member’s health crisis taking everyone’s attention off their own situation. The way the crisis works most effectively to create change is to allow Phil, whose sad philosophising has cemented him into apathy, to express his fear, need and loneliness to Penny. And Penny in turn finds a human compassion with which she can respond. It is perhaps the only level on which they can relate. ~ Avril Carruthers

Our Reviews:

Having watched 2 of Mike Leigh‘s previous movies, “Career Girls” and “Secrets & Lies,” I was looking forward to yet another dose of working class trials & tribulations in “All Or Nothing.” Leigh, who has positioned himself as the quintessential choice in writing and directing angst-driven, working class tales of day-to-day life, has once again proven his genius in depicting this particular class of the British society. While “Secrets & Lies” might have been filled with more intrigue and powerful emotions, this time around Leigh resorts to pathos. He takes us to a class ghetto aka government housing project in Southeast London to observe 3 low-income, working class families and the problems brought on not only by the lack of money but by the frustrations engendered by the boredom of unskilled work and the obstinacy of their teen-aged children. If you’re thinking of watching this movie to escape the harsh realities of life, this will not be your cup of tea, unfortunately, because the arc of the story is written with such an exclamation of harsh reality in every sense of the phrase, “Survival of the Fittest,” what you get by the end of the movie is the realization that Leigh‘s microscopic observation of life does strike a nerve in us. We don’t have to be in the working class status to understand the idiosyncracies of the human condition and behaviour. In a sense, “All Or Nothing” is essentially a grim, terribly bleak but realistic human story of survival, love or lack of, and despair. Is there a brighter horizon ahead of these seemingly doomed characters, you may ask. Leigh unwittingly lets them work out their issues among themselves and leave those that will never be resolved alone. An inevitable phrase from Phil in the movie, “We are born alone. We die alone,” screams “Help me!” in every sense of the word. This ultimate bleakness of the outlook of life makes us realize that our quality of life is dependent on how we deal with everyday life, be it good or bad, positive or negative. It’s what we focus on that dictates what kind of life we will end up living in. Leigh brings a sharpness to the human drama by the honesty and poignancy of the script, which was prepared in conjunction with the actors. The film is also invigorated by the subtle comic elements Leigh introduces into the grim story.

The performances by the ensemble cast are superb. Leigh regulars Timothy Spall and Lesley Manville give the year’s best performances for an actor and an actress. If you don’t get depressed yourself, there’s what goes for an uplifting payoff in the end. What’s poignant is that Leigh doesn’t play the superhero, trying to wipe away the underlying problems that the story entails. Hence, the story is resolved in the end without actually being resolved because that’s how it is in real life. We may be able to resolve the superficial layer of life’s problems but there’s much more work to do to actually dig out the underlying problems, let alone resolve them, all in 2 hours and 8 minutes! What makes “All Or Nothing” a wonderful, sobering, heart-felt drama is that Leigh doesn’t upset the order of things and keeps politics out of the story, thereby everything seems relatively tame. Rather, he takes all the misery facing the families and leaves it at that for them to work it out for themselves without any help from the institutions or from any master plan. This is a film about surviving from day to day, and it reflects the reality that faces most people in the world.

Of the three families living in the same graffiti-ridden housing complex, the film keys in on the depressive, overweight cab driver Phil (Spall) and his slim, mousy, supermarket cashier, common-law wife, Penny (Manville), and their uncommunicative, foul-mouth, obese son, Rory (Corden), and their docile, good-natured, overweight daughter, Rachel (Garland), who works as an orderly in a home for the aged. The mood of the family is uneasy: Rory has a nasty disposition and regularly curses at his mum; Rachel is withdrawn and has no love life and is resigned to accept her unhappy lot in life, as the only one who shows a romantic interest in her is an obnoxious co-worker who is old enough to be her grandfather; Phil can’t get it together to go to work days and become the main provider in the house, and is so much in la-la land he can’t function as a proper father; while Penny takes on the role of a martyr to a dysfunctional family and seems to have lost every ounce of respect for her hubby, who only stays with him because she has no expectations or hope for the future. Yet she remains with him as if she were bound by duty, just as she’s a caring mother despite her son’s hostility towards her. In a sense, these 2 hopeless parental individuals are so used to their daily routine that they simply get by despite the dissatisfaction and unhappiness of their situation. As change is always difficult to deal with, the paradigm of comfort takes the front seat. One uncomfortable but memorable moment is when Phil decides to switch off his phone and drives toward an abandoned shack by the sea. When I watched it, I couldn’t help but felt a sinking sensation that he was about to take his own life out of misery! He was that depressed and hopeless with the outlook of his own life! But then Leigh pulls us back to shore and makes us deal with Phil as the character reluctantly retreats to his bleak but disconcertingly content life that he inevitably created for himself.

Ron (Jesson) works as a cab driver in the same place Phil does and is a depressive with an alcohol problem. His even more depressive wife Carol (Bailey) is also a dead-beat individual, as both can barely function. Their slutty, idling daughter, Samantha (Hawkins), has contempt for both of them who spends time lusting over her neighbor’s repulsive boyfriend Jason (Mays). Like a predator waiting to pounce on its prey, she stands by the balcony looking for him to arrive in the complex in the most revealing outfit that she can squeeze herself into. She’s also being stalked by a creepy boy in her complex named Craig (Chapman), whom she feels repulsed by but can’t shake him off. The best Sally Hawkins moments are in 2 seemingly minuscule situations that speak volumes emotionally and psychologically: when she stops by the diner where her neighbor, Donna (Coker), works. While she sits at the table idly, watching Donna work, we also see a hint of envy in her eyes when she starts to ask about Donna’s work. She seems wanting to redeem herself from her own laziness, if not a brief moment only, with her body language and piercing eyes that speak of wanting to climb out of the dark hole that she’s dug herself with her hopeless life. But then, as if she sees the hardship that she may have to endure with a paradigm shift, she immediately reverts back to her old, lazy, despicable worthless self. That moment of dilemma that Hawkins portrays is so heartfelt, if not terribly frustrating to watch at the same time, as she’d rather choose to waste her life away than to make it worthwhile. The other moment is when she finally realizes what she’s done to Craig, who obviously is in love with her and would do anything to express it. As his final attempt to get Samantha’s attention, he resorts to self-mutilation, to her utter horror! She never once thought that all her cruel teases with Craig, making him think that she’s interested in him at all, would mean any harm. Her immaturity and selfish desire to have fun at other people’s expense have finally come to a screeching halt when she realizes that it’s caused physical harm to another human being. That night, in her bedroom, we see her break down in tears, terrified of the consequences of her own despicable actions. Finally, we see a transformation of a worthless character with no redeeming qualities to one that does seem to have a ray of hope after all. Yet another outstanding performance by Sally Hawkins!

Also living in the complex, next door to Ron, is Maureen (Sheen), a co-worker of Penny’s. She’s a single mom who tries to make things cheery by cracking banal jokes, and she earns extra money by doing private laundry services for those in the housing complex. For fun she goes out with the other two complex ladies to this dreary bar, where her only joy is when she sings on a karaoke night. Her sullen daughter Donna, a clerk in a convenience store, whom she tries to be both a friend and mother to, has become pregnant to her bullying boyfriend Jason and has been told by him that he not only doesn’t love her, but he doesn’t even like her and that she’s a lousy lay. She’s now faced with the same life decision her mother had when she became pregnant without a husband, whether to have an abortion or keep the baby.

Everything looks hopeless for the three families. Things get worst for Phil and Penny when Rory suffers a heart attack while playing football with his project friends and is rushed to the hospital. When Phil can’t be reached because he turned off his cab phone and drove out to the shore to be alone and think about the funk he’s in, his wife’s longtime disappointment with him now comes out in the open. The culminating event in the film is an argument between Phil and Penny as he accuses her of not only not being in love with him anymore, but not even liking or respecting him.

This stagy production makes for spellbinding drama. It’s through the naturalistic performances that a great depth in character is reached. The main characters find redemption for themselves not by winning the lottery but in the small things in life that hold them together. It’s a most believable drama, and one that goes out of its taxi fare zone to point out that no matter how desperate one’s situation is– humanity is dependent on love and decency. The coldness and harshness of life are conditions that might never be solved by politics; but, for Leigh, human beings can affirm the quality of life when they find some peace within themselves. Rachel found such peace when she reads a book in bed at night and shuts off the horrors of her dull life. Maureen finds it by looking at the brighter side of things rather than dwelling on her misery. Phil and Penny find some peace from their economic struggles when they begin to communicate with each other instead of secretively brooding. Despite the bleak setting of the film, believe it or not, Leigh paints a rosy picture for those who can open up and find love. The alternative for him is nothing. ~ Coggy

All or Nothing (Film)

All or Nothing

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