HIGH HOPES
One of the most interesting things about Mike Leigh’s up-to-the-minute bulletin from Thatcher England is its title. Because this wonderful English movie is partly a comedy, and because it’s very much about the way that Londoners live nowadays, one would assume a title like High Hopes is ironic. Among most of my English friends, the expectations currently expressed about their country’s future couldn’t be much lower; and at first glance, there’s nothing in this movie to contradict their pessimism.
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Another cause for hope, qualified but genuine, is the fact that films about the horrors of Thatcherism, like High Hopes, last year’s Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, and the forthcoming For Queen and Country, are actually being made, distributed, and seen. What kind of equivalents are there about the horrors of Reaganism? At best we get semimetaphorical statements like Walker, They Live, and Parents–not movies to be sniffed at, but not really investigations of the actual texture of our lives, either. That all three movies have to resort to fantasy and/or history in order to comment on the present is grimly significant; it’s almost as if we will have to experience some sort of Yankee glasnost before we can deal with such matters straight in our movies, without the sugar frosting and concealment provided by gloss and genre. (At least we had the benefit of Albert Brooks’s Lost in America a few years back.) People who see dream bubbles like Rain Man or Mississippi Burning as “realistic” only demonstrate that, unlike the English, we no longer have a realist tradition–assuming that we ever had one in the first place.
High Hopes doesn’t have a lot of plot, but it has people to spare, spread out neatly over three classes and given three levels of stylization. Cyril works as a motorbike messenger and Shirley is a council garden worker; their political friend Suzi (Judith Scott) seems equally working-class and disenfranchised. Cyril’s forgetful widowed mother, Mrs. Bender (Edna Dore), who also lives in King’s Cross, and is on the brink of Alzheimer’s disease, is the last council tenant on an otherwise gentrified street. Wayne (Jason Watkins), a provincial innocent who is briefly taken in and coddled by Cyril and Shirley when he has nowhere else to go, appears to be equally strapped for cash. Wayne’s helplessness may be a bit exaggerated (he doesn’t even know what “cabbie” means), but the other four characters are as real as any in recent movies.
Many non-English critics, myself included, have long harbored a belief that formal and structural inventiveness and English realism are somehow incompatible; but assuming that this was ever the case, recent films like High Hopes and Terence Davies’s forthcoming Distant Voices, Still Lives decisively make this assumption seem antiquated and false. Despite the seemingly loose, episodic structure of High Hopes, Leigh proceeds through a system of parallels, between characters and between scenes, that couldn’t be more pointedly and creatively organized. The sexual habits and predilections of the three main couples are delightfully juxtaposed, and woven throughout the film are the parallel treatments of two wholly separate and unconnected characters, Wayne and Mrs. Bender, the two lost souls who need Cyril and Shirley’s succor.
