DD: Tender Loving Care, set in working class London is said to be Mike Leigh’s final film, At 83, his field of play this last time out is looking at what Mum, Da and the grown kids do to and for each other in their working class flat in London. We caught up to our film critic, Harlan Jacobson, just back from his swing through the Toronto, San Sebastian and now the 64th New York Film Festival.
HJ: For over 50 years, Leigh has mastered the hard art of simply dropping you into a room and letting you watch real people work through the gears changing in their universe in speech so pitch-perfect, so alive, so gently funny, felt and idiomatic, that it’s hard not to think you’re behind a living room curtain in a London flat somewhere peeping at family and friends thinking they’re alone.
In her fourth film with Leigh, Kate O’Flynn as Amy Fletcher, returns home to her parents, Birdie and Geoff Spooner, after a failed marriage. At 39, trying to do the right thing for kids who of course can’t see it, she works in British child services. Working her way up Leigh’s ladder in supporting parts in Peterloo, Mr Turner and Happy Go Lucky, O’Flynn slips right into the magic circle of previous Leigh working class heroines, Sally Hawkins, Marianne Jean-Baptiste, and Brenda Blethyn, among others, women who carry their worlds and the men therein on their shoulders and whom you are reluctant to part. Alice Bailey Johnson’s Rosie is also a social worker working a different case load and Amy’s childhood BFF, best friend, forever. Where Amy is blue, Rosie has a little more appetite to mix it up. Here she drops into see her just returned home bestie, Amy.
For Amy, O’Flynn’s working girl, men are over for now, it’s a matter of settling in, and supporting Birdie, Mum (Marion Bailey), as she cushions the slow fade of her husband and Amy’s dad, Geoff (Paul Jesson). Tender Loving Care is maybe the last light of the Working Class Revolution, giving voice to the vulnerable quotidian people who show up, tucking their vulnerability away when there’s a job to do. All his women have taken a hit— in Life is Sweet, Secrets & Lies, High Hopes, Vera Drake, the scalding Hard Truths of two years ago with Marianne-Jean Baptiste. Leigh has extended his family portraits even into historical portraits of men, the raucous homelife of seascape painter JMW Turner and the collegial family of Gilbert & Sullivan in the musical bio, Topsy Turvy.I loved that one. Tender Living Care doesn’t need to be Leigh’s last film for it to crest through the major international fall film festivals, where I’ve been in the last month and half -- Toronto, San Sebastian and now at the just ending 64th New York FF. Mike Leigh is not above scowling at the stupid, but Tender Loving Care,like all his work, is shot full of hope.
NY, Toronto, SS festivals are the launch pads for the coming fall into spring films, so it’s no surprise that you could see the great panorama of the coming seasons’ A-List films:
Clarissa, the splendid update of Virginia Woolf’s 1925 novel, Mrs Dalloway, to the start almost 20 years ago of the Boko Haram insurgency in Nigeria. With Sophie Okenedo in the title role supported by Ayo Eidbiri
Werner Hezog’s Bucking Fastard, which despite its high school antics title, is better than I had hoped, with the Rooney sisters, Kate and Mara, playing sisters who are nearly Siamese twins. They’re like crazy Hotchcock versions of Little Women, who disappear into a mad tunnel in search of the light at the end of same… BF is the latest in Herzog’s portraits of crazy obsessed questers, from Fitzcarraldo to the guy the bear ate in Grizzly. I saw this at Lincoln Center’s satellite campus at the AMC Bay in the Bronx, and loved the quest to get there.
Couldn’t get more timely than Ava DuVernay’s 14th, the NYFF closing night film, a first rate alarm about the post civil; war Amendment that guaranteed citizen ship to all born in the USA. It was meant for slaves originally, but DuVernay’s assemblage of notable historians and political figures, led by Sherilynn Ifill, bring it all home to where we are now in the anti-immigrant crusade led by a mean bunch. Unlike some other media folks, you can’t fault Netflix, which financed the doc, for lack of guts.
The New York FF might have closed with home grown The Only Living Pickpocket in NY, had it not premiered in Toronto and Sundance before that. It’s so NY, following the always watchable, homeboy character ace, John Turturro, who snags a leading role rarely, only when the story calls for real. As he’s aged, Turturro has become completely smooth as a NY shmear.
Here he ‘s Harry Lehman, a retirement age pickpocket in actor turned writer & director Noah Segan’s The Only Living Pickpocket in New York. Harry’s just working the turf, picking the pockets of the careless, bringing the daily haul of trinkets to Steve Buscemi at Ben’s pawn shop in the Bronx. How perfect is that?
Harry is certainly Jewish, there’s a mezuzah on the right door jamb, and whether Ben is or not I can’t say, but they’re recognizably New Yorkers, doing the Bronx haggle over peanuts compared to the Financial District. When Harry inadvertently lifts a mafioso baby’s valuables including his crypto key worth hundreds of million, he’s got what they say in Yiddish is shpilkes for himself and his paralyzed, mute wife.
The mafia brat has resources, but in what turns out to be a New vs. Old school story, Harry has resources, too, in Sagan’s very clever script. That’s why Harry can call on a little help from his friends, including Giancarlo Esposito as a detective with whom he has some history. Harry’s got the smarts that age has over muscle. That Harry takes a ride in a custom Cadillac Escalade with the Mafia boss lady – I won’t spoil who that is -- is the kind of romantic landing that this movie sticks better than life. My kinda shaggy dog NY story that closes with Cole Porter’s I happen to Like New York. Me, too.
