Movie Review – Life is Sweet

Life Is Sweet (1990)
Written and directed by Mike Leigh

Mike Leigh could be seen as a director who makes funny little movies about British working-class people’s lives. That is true to an extent. However, there’s so much more happening under the surface of these films, which is Leigh pointing out to us how complex & nuanced lives we see as surface-level can be. Our lives are more complicated than someone like Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg. We experience life more fully than them, as we are still in contact with what makes us part of the natural world: the struggle for survival. Being working-class in the West is very complex, as you’ve been afforded some distractions & escapes that people in the developing world can only dream of. Yet, you still experience regular anxiety over housing/bills/food/etc. Life is often complicated by our perspective and class position.

Andy & Wendy (Jim Broadbent & Alison Steadman, respectively) are a husband & wife who are hard-working middle-class Britons. He’s a catering chef in London with dreams of running his own food truck while Wendy sells baby clothes & supervises children’s playgroups. They have 22-year-old twins still living at home – Natalie and Nicola. Natalie (Claire Skinner) is tomboyish and thinks her father never has a bad idea. Nicola (Jane Horrocks) is a shut-in, misanthropic, spouts communist theory and has a severe eating disorder she thinks is secret to the rest of the family. 

Orbiting their lives are some fellow travelers: Aubrey (Timothy Spall) is a neurodivergent fellow chef who is about to open his Parisian-themed restaurant without having all his ducks in a row. Patsy (Stephen Rea) is Andy’s drinking buddy who is always looking for a loan of a few bucks. Then there’s the mysterious young man (David Thewlis) Nicola invites over only when the rest of the family is out. They have sex, but that’s about it, even though he wants their relationship to become something more serious. We follow their lives over a few weeks one summer, seeing how events play out and witnessing the start of needed changes.

The title is a reference to food, something that plays a vital role in every subplot. Food is an object of high luxury, as seen in Andy’s sterile London kitchen, where he watches over his staff preparing dishes. It’s also part of his dream of economic freedom, refurbishing the rundown van he’s bought from Andy. Aubrey’s Regret Rein becomes the site of a comical set-piece as Wendy volunteers to help as a waitress on opening night, only to witness her friend’s meltdown. Nicola’s relationship with food is the most complicated of all – hiding away chocolate beneath her bed, gorging on it at night, and then throwing it all up. “Life is sweet” for some people, but certainly not for everyone, and I would argue definitely bitter for most. Leigh knows this because he’s watched his home country endure over a decade of Thatcher-era policies by this point.

One of Leigh’s trademarks in his work is giving each character a vivid, unusual personality that is very much present in Life is Sweet. Wendy is the type of British mom you expect, gregarious and quick to laugh, trying to make the best of tricky situations. Aubrey is a very absent-minded but gentle & loving soul. He gets overwhelmed quickly during the opening of his restaurant, and while we can understand Wendy’s frustrations with him, we also don’t judge the guy too harshly. Nicola is an acidic person from whom you will want to withdraw, but that is why she has adopted that persona: to keep people away from her. Thus, when her beau comes around, he frustrates her desire to be distant from people. He wants to meet the family, but if she allows this, it will cause them to soften their image of her.

Nicola is a personality I’m sure many of us have met. She fashions herself a left-wing radical but does nothing beyond wearing t-shirts with bumper sticker slogans on them about taxes or hurling insults at members of her family. “Racist” in response to someone making a disparaging comment about Americans. “Capitalist” in response to her father and mother discussing opening a food truck. This reveals that Nicola doesn’t understand the ideology she claims. She, like so many others, has boiled communism down to being against the standard. Leigh, as a communist/anarchist, knows this because it was probably something he went through as a youth and has seen in others. 

My favorite aspect of Leigh’s filmmaking is his refusal to provide uplifting moments to his audience. We enter the story when the family already has years and years of history behind them. We assume they don’t know about Nicola’s eating disorder as she only does it at night when she is sure everyone else is asleep. Later, it’s revealed that it had gotten worse in the past to the point that Nicola’s parents hospitalized her because she was so close to death. The harshness is cut with quiet moments of intimate love – the film’s conclusion is touching with an authentic conversation between the twins about the state of things. It doesn’t solve their problem, but it reminds us that life is a series of challenges we overcome while enjoying the beautiful bits in between.

Leigh prefers to work out the dialogue through improvisation with his actors, so he often employs the same performers. It’s a way to skip the “getting to know you” phase. Alison Steadman is one of his mainstays; she feels wholly natural as Wendy. Broadbent and Spall, also regular collaborators, take on their roles perfectly. Horrocks, as Nicola, is someone who feels like they should be a Leigh regular, yet this is her only time working with the director. 

I also want to note how fascinating Natalie’s character was to me. Claire Skinner does an excellent job in this supporting role, which I think is made even more incredible by her role in our next film, Naked, where she is nearly unrecognizable while not doing too much to alter her appearance. I don’t think it is a massive leap to say that Natalie is coded as nonbinary or transgender. She uses female pronouns but only dresses in men’s clothing (something the film provides a scene for early on), works in construction, and doesn’t have any romantic partners that the family knows. 

There’s some light pushback on her clothing choices, but through conversation, we learn that Nicola is quite jealous of how Natalie has had her choices so accepted by their parents. As we know, transgender people have existed in every society since the beginning of time, but in popular media, they were often hidden away or presented as jokes/horrors. Leigh knows people like Natalie and wanted to feature a character like her because he knew it was important that people like Natalie saw themselves in a film somewhere. Her family seems to know something, but they don’t necessarily have the language to articulate it.

Life is Sweet reminds us that sweet can sometimes be an unpleasant flavor. As I’ve gotten older, the sugary candies I used to be able to wolf down in handfuls have become undesirable. A few will suffice; sometimes, I’d rather have none. Bitter is a sweet that crosses a line and becomes too much, an acrid nasty flavor. Sweetness is something that must be balanced, and life can provide us with a myriad of flavors. I adore Leigh’s humanism, and Life is Sweet is a celebration of people for all their complications & conflicts. The fact that we endure and live on into the next day is a testament to that.