High Hopes (1989)

Best movie of this year hands down!

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

I watched it after having seen the glowing reviews and references to mike Leigh's work, well all I saw was a cartoon. A political cheap shot that relies on such simplistic and exaggerated caricatures really only cheapens any point he is trying to make. The car salesman and his social-climbing wife are obnoxious to the point of absurdity, the posh folks next door are the same, all ice-cold and uncaring, basically he isn't doing so much social commentary as beating his point to death with such a ham-fisted delivery that he destroys his own credibility. Long shots of the elderly woman and her plight in this cartoon just come off as out of place in this film, on one hand it is pretending to explore real issues like aging and socialist ideas in thatchers Britain, but surrounded by the cartoonish back ground it just comes off as very pointless. You got where he was going in the first 25% of the film, and it doesn't really add anything from that point on, it just continues beating the dead horse, nothing much of real value is explored after that. Other reviews mention it explores dynamics of family and siblings and aging, but really it only touches on these in the most shallow way possible between the absurd moments of cartoonish acting. It is the kind of film you'd expect from a political hack, not a philosopher.

HIGH HOPES provides most strengths and few weaknesses of its superb director, Mike Leigh, with the former category including his choice of footage from a typically improvisational collection of scenes; avoidance of a formulaic scenario when comparing and contrasting three widely disparate but plot-connected couples, in a Margaret Thatcher administered England; skill in controlling mood adjustment and visual constructs that generally serve to intensify viewer response; and his canny employment of technicians to implement effective staging design. Leigh's bent toward usage of politically charged economic allusions as a referent to class structure and social change leads here to role stereotypes, indeed even caricature, during scenes wherein emphasis is upon parody, as only one of the couples, former Hippies Cyril (Philip Davis) and Shirley (Ruth Sheen), is permitted to display humanity whereas Shirley's brother Martin (Philip Jackson) and his wife Valerie (Heather Tobias), along with the gentrified Booth-Braines (David Bamber and Lesley Manville) are essentially burlesque figures. In her patented persona as an old woman lapsing into dementia, Edna Doré becomes a linchpin about whom the others revolve, with Sheen taking acting honours with her finely nuanced performance as a societal rebel beginning to crave, albeit non-bourgeois, motherhood. Cinematographer Roger Pratt, along with ever inventive Leigh, use closeups to potent effect for a film that would more nearly approach greatness if a hammy lack of restraint from some talented players, although frequently highly comic, would have received closer directoral oversight.

This is a magnificent film full of humour, dignity and tragedy. The two most compelling characters are the hirsute courier, Cyril, and his gardener girlfriend Shirley, socialists both, who have an ongoing, symbolic debate about whether to have a baby or not. In the meantime - no pun intended - the courier's mother is dying - tired, losing her short term memory, and lonely. Other important characters include two appalling yuppies - caricatures only if you had your eyes closed in 80s Britain - plus the courier's nouveau riche but working class sister and her misogynistic husband. Karl Marx's sad big head at Highgate cemetery also makes an entry into the film.Mike Leigh is a wonderful talent - long may his film-making continue! Postscript: Great news the film is now available on DVD - see http://www.hopscotchfilms.com.au!

The life and times of an extended family in 1980's London.Director Mike Leigh is probably the closest the UK has to Woody Allen: and like Allen his films go from absolute classics to barely watchable. Here he is about as good as he ever will be - indeed there are scenes from this movie that are, in there own way, as profound and original as anything that has been put down on film.Who else would let the camera linger on the face of an old woman just at the point of losing her sanity? Or dare to present a couple going nowhere as the centrepiece of a feature film? Or even present "success stories" (a yuppie couple) as rank and selfish? Here lower-middle-and-upper crusts are clowns, it is only a matter of levels and angles.Indeed, Leigh never gives us anything to cling to. Nor does he want to present hope that things will change for the better. Take the central couple Shirley and Cyril (Philip Davies and Ruth Sheen). Why are they living like squatters in their own tiny flat? Why can they not buy a proper bed (they sleep on the floor) or look for somewhere better - after all they both work? Apart from the question of a child (she wants - he doesn't) they both seem happy to live in squalor. In Shirley we at least have someone who cares for other people.The old lady - through which the story is told - is on her last legs as regards living an independent life. The house she lives in has become neglected and the area she lives in no longer contain her type of people. Her neurotic daughter is so wrapped up in her own suburban life that she does seem to realise her mother is at the point of collapse. The scene where she holds a birthday party for her aged mother is agony - not for her confused mother - but for us the viewer.Some of the performances are a little of the top (Leigh's films let actors improvise) and I could have lived without so much of the melancholy music track that rubs everything in. But this is the only film since One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest that lets humour and tragedy sit side by side without blinking.Director Leigh gets under your skin and takes you places we haven't been on film before - but I am not sure they are places I would want to go on a regular basis. He is a one-off, but I am secretly glad about that.