Movie Review – All or Nothing

All or Nothing (2002)
Written and directed by Mike Leigh

Mike Leigh doesn’t cast people that meet the Hollywood standards of “beauty,” but damn if his performers are not always beautiful & captivating. They reveal that actual beauty is not a series of symmetrical physical features on the face or a toned body but in the ability to capture moments of the human experience. We often must rush past these moments in our daily lives because the systems that rule us demand we go faster. Within a Leigh film, the actor can sit in a moment, examine & explore it, and find the truth within it. Leigh’s films are all about the reality of what it means to be a human being alive in these times, seeking connection & meaning.

All or Nothing returns to the lives of ordinary British people trying to make ends meet. This time, we follow three families who live in the same estate. Phil (Timothy Spall) is a taxi driver who depends on Penny (Lesley Manville) to pay the bills with her supermarket cashier job. They have two children, Rachel and Rory, each dealing with challenges. The next family is Maureen (Ruth Sheen) and her adult daughter, Donna. Donna ends up pregnant by her deviant boyfriend, and Maureen promises her daughter that she can do this just like she did for Donna. The third family consists of Ron (Paul Jesson), a fellow cabbie to Phil, his daughter Samantha (Sally Hawkins), and his wife Carol (Marion Bailey). Carol is an alcoholic, and Ron doesn’t do much to try and help her; instead, he joins her in drinking.

A Mike Leigh film is skirting the edge of melodrama. I can see traces of Douglas Sirk and Rainer Werner Fassbinder in there, but where they might employ a more glamorous aesthetic to juxtapose against the grim themes & topics, Leigh refrains. Instead, he ensures that nothing about his characters’ stories feels heightened. Naked was the only one of his films I’ve felt moved out of the realm of the authentic, but that served that story’s purpose quite well. All or Nothing is a mixture of the grimness of Naked with the family drama of Life is Sweet. These families have been in crisis for a while, and they either meet it head-on within this film or try to ignore it and keep going.

I’ve mentioned her before in this series, but I want to talk about Lesley Manville. I’ve previously watched & reviewed Another Year, which is Leigh’s showpiece for her, but I think she delivers something quite close to Penny. Manville has an acting range that puts Gary Oldman to shame. That is ironic because he is her ex-husband. In High Hopes, Manville pulled off a snobbish posh gentrifier. In Secrets & Lies, she effortlessly takes on the role of an East End social worker. As Penny, she has to play a quieter role, but she brings aching pathos to the whole thing. Penny is a woman who suffers in silence, and the screen aches with her pain.

All or Nothing is more a series of character sketches than attempting to tell a singular story. We spend time with each person and get to see them interact with many of the others. Manville’s moments felt like such pure human emotion. She is so ignored and spoken to in such an ugly way by people around her. Penny has retreated into a vacant stare, a series of physical motions, all of this on repeat every day apparently until she dies. Her partner Phil is in a similar state of mind, but he can sleep in late and choose whether or not he wants to pick up fares for the day. He’s clearly in a deep state of depression, but so is she. Manville captures the feeling of an obligation to love that was once something Penny embraced enthusiastically. Now, she’s just stuck in this life.

The film’s centerpiece is a scene between Penny and Phil near the end. They finally talk about their relationship, a topic of conversation that had been lost under the heap of responsibilities & challenges of life. This isn’t people shouting or trying to hurt each other. It’s two people trying to remember what it was like to fall in love back then, to contemplate whether or not they can recapture that feeling or still love each other in a new way. This was the first scene in a Mike Leigh movie that made me weep. The humanity between Manville & Spall is so potent & natural. The popular notion these days is for conflict between two people in love to be portrayed in loud, painful, broad paint brush strokes, but that’s not what life or a healthy relationship is like. Vulnerability is a far more powerful method of working through hurt. It will provide actual healing.

I can say I identify with Phil. You could easily read him as being neurodivergent coded. That made me feel a powerful emotional connection to Penny because, much like my wife, she is so supportive of her husband, yet that comes with a cost. She works herself to the bone. Phil expresses how much he acknowledges this, how he wishes he could just get up and go and do it, but that depression has its claws in him, dragging him down. He offers to leave so that Penny would have one less burden to deal with. This isn’t presented in a manipulative way, Phil truly wants things to be easier for Penny. And much like in real life, people who love each other and have invested their lives in each other, Phil & Penny are trying to find a way. 

They are just one of many stories in All or Nothing. The parallels between Maureen being a single mother raising her daughter and now her daughter about to go down that path was another powerful subplot. The alcoholism of Ron & Carol is one of the film’s tragic endings, not that they die, but that they just keep sinking further and further down. Carol, in particular, feels like someone who is going to deteriorate until there is nothing left. 

In this film, Leigh explores the brutality people in dire circumstances often show towards each other. Early in the movie, Penny comes home to find her son being viciously bullied by neighbor kids. He spits venom at his parents, and Penny becomes passive-aggressive towards Phil. The brutality is infectious; the source is at the top of a society, how people are crushed by systems that alienate and abuse them. They want to feel powerful, so they punch sideways or down. This aggression ultimately damages people, and it is only in seeking connection & understanding that we see healing start. Like a great Leigh film, he won’t tie things up in a pretty bow. Life just isn’t like that. Yet he leaves us hopeful, believing these people can find a way.