In coordination with the release of his newest film, Peterloo, this month The Pink Smoke will be exploring the work of noted curmudgeon and dyspeptic genius Mike Leigh. From his early teleplays to his recent historical dramas, Leigh's focus has stayed constant: the elusive qualities of happiness, the constrictions of family, the friction between the have's and have-not's, the relationship between work and personal fulfillment.

Leigh unusual method for developing his screenplays (and his unique process for working with actors) results in films that are notably chaotic, complex, and spilling over with a sense of life that few artworks can match. We're excited to explore the worlds that Leigh has created; his films provide a seemingly inexhaustible supply of new discoveries, strange notions, startling emotions, and (most importantly) unforgettable characters.

{PiNK SMOKE PODCAST: PETERLOO}
{THEiR EARLiER STUFF WAS BETTER}
{SPALL OR NOTHiNG: PART 1}
{SECOND CHANCES: CAREER GiRLS}
{MiKE ON A BiKE}

"Mike Leigh’s films are so often about the majesty of the incongruous person. He gives the best shot to people who you'd cross the street to avoid. Or who, at the very least, you'd dismiss as boring, irritating, annoying. He makes you understand them properly. He brings a nobility and majesty to their lives."

~ Timothy Spall, Radiotimes 10/31/14

"This is a painting," is how Mike Leigh introduces the first shot of Mr. Turner on the DVD's audio commentary, and indeed DP Dick Pope infuses a Dutch dusk with artist JMW Turner's signature Indian Yellow, joining land and sky in a pervading sepia. The camera picks up two women walking along, chatting buoyantly in their native tongue, rustic looks and earth-toned outfits making them feel like a natural part of the surroundings and their movement coordinating harmoniously with that of the shot. This is a painting - this is a breathtaking portrait of the world.

But the pan comes to an abrupt halt when it finds the outline of a man standing defiantly in the opposite direction in the background; it loses the two women, who take no notice of the man as he takes none of them. His silhouette, dark against the hard brightness, is a blot on this gorgeously rendered landscape, and the most interesting thing about it. This is Turner. This is Timothy Spall.

Throughout the film we'll see Spall as Turner in a number of elegant settings where his drab semblance and surly demeanor don't belong. In the stately ballroom of the Pentworth estate, where he infiltrates the ears of a lovely pianist with a guttural rendition of "Dido's Lament" that sounds like a bird dying. On the stretch of golden sand on the beach at Margate, where he makes himself a fixture until the invigorating environment poisons him and forces him to leave. Among the sea of vibrant images by the greatest painters in England at the Royal Academy, where Turner takes a brush and smears an unseemly glob of red paint on one of his own immaculate depictions of grandiose ships beneath "the fiery firmament."

This is immediately taken as a brutal parody of rival artist John Constable's color palette, but following a minor touch-up with one hideous fingernail it's revealed to have a second purpose as a red buoy set behind a silver wave. Again this blot is Turner, incongruous to its canvas yet the first thing to capture the eye. Nobody can play the incongruous person better than Timothy Spall, and after 32 years of working with Mike Leigh, Mr. Turner is their destined collaboration.

Spall's Turner doesn't see himself as the buoy; that's how Leigh sees him. In suggesting that the film is about "the tension between this eccentric, flawed, vulnerable, passionate, driven, grubby individual and this amazing, epic, sublime art that he created," Leigh clearly sees the grubbiness of Turner as part of the creative process and a vital element of the resulting sublimity.

That's why Leigh places Turner inside the aesthetic of the man's art, at one point even literally inserting him into his most famous painting, The Fighting Temeraire.¹ If Turner did put himself into one of his paintings, he'd more likely be the elephant that his father challenges Mary Somerville to locate in the dynamic Snow Storm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps, a meager speck in the distance dwarfed by the elements. A legendary behemoth reduced to a flea on the surface of an overwhelmingly beautiful world.

Spall plays Turner as an elephant, unable to diminish either his giant reputation or his imposing and grotesque physicality. The performance is a force of nature, bestial, elemental - there is nothing like it. From developing his own language of grunts and growls to moving along the streets of London with a severely hunched carriage as if tethered to the terra firma, Spall designs the character as one who's made the decision to contribute society nothing beyond the fruits of his natural brilliance.

As he hobnobs with the posh elite who admire his genius but certainly can't stand him for too long, he displays his love for all things tasteful and highbrow - speaking in a manner that suggests an amiable barber inquiring whether the gentleman would like a shave (possibly taking after his father, a former barber) - while giving no mind to the general impression his monstrous affectation has on others. "When I peruse myself in the looking glass, I see a gargoyle" he tells his sweet mistress Sophia Booth, who assures him "it is within a person that do matter." Mrs. Booth (interestingly played by Marion Bailey, Leigh's real-life companion) gives all of herself to the world despite having nothing of artistic value to offer it. Turner is the exact opposite, hardening into a gargoyle to create a separation between himself and everything that's not him.

This makes the character an interesting contradiction: an aggressive, boorish personality who prefers to seek solitude and escape within himself. Why build a gallery inside his home with an open invitation to come view his archive, yet hide inside the studio and watch visitors through a peephole? Why escape to a double life by the Thames under an assumed name while his dedicated housekeeper in London wonders where the hell he is all the time?

Turner may not have consciously built a wall around himself, as Leigh and Spall have devised him, but his detachment from humanity is methodical. He has nothing but love for his father yet nothing left for his two grown daughters; moreso, he won't even acknowledge their existence to people outside the household and would most likely forget it all together if his former lover didn't routinely disrupt his isolation to shame this emotional neglect. We know he has these emotions - he's devastated by his father's death and privately mourns the death of his daughter - and that he doesn't simply reserve them all for his painting, otherwise he couldn't enjoy an intellectual friendship with Mary Somerville and a tender romance with Sophia.

It may be that his sense of hubris, the theme of his Hannibal painting (reflecting the real Turner's view of powerful contemporary figures like Napoleon), is too great. Turner the artist is so big that he eclipses Turner the man. He's comfortable in his role as a celebrity and accordingly plays into the legend, whether it's accepting invitations to fancy weekend gatherings or tolerating snobby art critics. He's more than willing to put himself on display like a dancing bear, furiously attacking a painting at the Academy, lewdly spitting on it as he jabs the canvas with the brush to the delight of a peanut gallery of well-dressed gentlemen in a frenzied semblance of performance art. This is Turner the rock star, giving the public the Turner it wants.

Leigh transitions from this scene to the enormous gnarled facade of a rocky cliff, disorienting the viewer by making it look like the close-up of a painting before panning down to reveal Turner's comparatively small form going about his way below. We see here the genuine Turner, less a lauded master of light than a wayward traveler trapped inside his own epic vision, more like the timid caretaker of a magnificent talent than the individual whose mind, eyes and hands created these images.

In their collaborative research Leigh and Spall have sketched the character as much from his artwork as his biography, having Turner rebel against his sizable reputation so that, like many of the living figures found in the paintings, he's dwindled to the background of his life story in quiet moments like these. Only the most humble of human subjects make it into his paintings; the vainglorious are unworthy of his interpretation, he moreso than others.

This becomes even more apparent in the second half of the film when Turner's later work starts being presented to a hostile public. Queen Victoria sneers at Sunrise with Sea Monsters, an abstract painting in which the colors engulf the subject so as to make it indiscernible, perhaps seeing that Turner's esoteric new style has obfuscated any connection to humanity. Leigh doesn't follow the typical route of the biopic (as if he ever would!) by having Turner fall prey to fevered obsession or addiction or scandal; he has his artist paint himself into obscurity, this eclipsing of substance through swirling atmospherics and penetrating light ("mere freaks of chromomania" a publication termed them at the time) coinciding with his gradual withdraw from the world.

During this segment of the film Turner becomes a phantom, overhearing Victoria's criticisms almost invisibly, viewing a theatrical parody of his work alone in a dark booth, haunting the table of his benefactors as a sullen, grey drunk who scares the poor young woman sitting next to him when he tries to communicate.² The elements are overwhelming the subjects of the paintings just as reality is beginning to overwhelm Turner.

Leigh never suggests Turner's talent is waning or that his new style is anything less than radical and inimitable, he only charts a course of Turner becoming removed from his life as we know it at the beginning of the film - the loss of his father, his gradual retreat from the London home, his falling out of favor with the general public - as a natural progression to death. Therefore the paintings are always majestic, but the gallery in Turner's house disintegrates somewhat over the length of the film. Its exotic introduction, with Turner Sr. insisting viewers first linger in a dimly-lit parlor to enhance the effect of the paintings, makes the room seem magical. By its final scene, the gallery is littered with buckets collecting rainwater leaking through the dirty tarp that's sagging with the tiny carcasses of blue bottles.

Even then, standing with Peter Wight's millionaire pen manufacturer Joseph Gillott in the dilapidated gallery when the end of everything JMW Turner is evident, he turns down Gillott's offer to buy all the paintings for a stupefying amount of money. The art existing beyond the man has motivated Turner in all his actions, whether it's tolerating rich patrons or devoting all energy to creation at the expense of family and friends. With all the beauty in his soul spilled onto the canvas, what remains of Turner is a body half-awake, barely articulate and savage in its urgency. He may be the elephant, but is he also the storm?

Leigh devotes a solid portion of the film to Turner's decline. He starts showing signs of poor health (first suffering bronchitis after strapping himself to the mast of a ship, then collapsing on a long staircase due to a heart condition) when the movie still has an hour to go. So nearly half the film is an elegy to a dying artist. Turner sees his time coming in a variety of ways, first through the ailing of his namesake father, then the condemnations of his artistic predecessor Claude Lorrain as a man whose "time has now long past" followed by his own work suffering similar criticism and finally the dawn of photography, the metaphorical steamship that will tug the art of painting to its final berth and Turner along with it.

Leigh's obviously very keen to chronicle Turner's death; the fact that the real Turner lived to 76 may have even proven somewhat inconvenient to his narrative interests (Leigh just turned 76 last month and hopefully will long outlive his subject and produce further work over many several years).³ His decision is to have Turner die spiritually, like Vera Drake, long before his actual demise.

At the end of Mr. Turner, Leigh revisits the opening of the film by dissecting it into its final three shots. First he resurrects Turner after his death scene with another silent silhouette against the sky reminiscent of his initial appearance. He then ends the film on two women: Turner's seaside landlady/mistress Sophia Booth and Hannah Danby, Turner's loyal housekeeper of 40 years. They might very well have been the two jovial Dutch women from the beginning, their paths having crossed with JMW Turner for a period of time, but that one of them is pleasantly happy and the other utterly distraught. Sophia, despite having buried two husbands in addition to Turner, finds herself at her domestic chores smiling, having experienced Turner at his most vulnerable and unguarded in the refuge of his getaway home. In clearing the windows she's opening her household to the light of the sun Turner so revered.⁴

Hannah, having served as Turner's assistant in London whose sole function was to maintain the mammoth work by preparing paints and canvases, is seen wandering aimlessly through a darkened, sunless house strewn with remnants of Turner's career, ending up in his empty studio sobbing pitifully, her skin consumed by psoriasis as if misery has been painted onto her. Aesthetically this last image is anything but a Turner painting, although we understand that Hannah's life has been overwhelmed by his, and she's now a dark shape lost among it. The beauty and monstrosity of Turner are summed up in these two shots, as Turner the man has left behind a happy woman and Turner the artist who barely shares two sentences with Hannah (and only barks orders) has left behind a miserable woman.

"The universe is very chaotic, and you make us see it." An interesting choice of words from Mary Somerville to Turner: it pretty well describes what Mike Leigh sets out to do in all his projects, find the truth in chaos. Obviously a movie about an artist is going to reflect the filmmaker's perception of himself as an artist, and Turner with his obvious genius and love of beauty is a subject after Leigh's own heart - the painter's massive flaws are just a part of that chaos to which the filmmaker seeks to bring order. Part of Leigh's chaotic process is that the character is created with the actor, so Timothy Spall is the co-author of this role, the 7th such success of the "Spalleigh" union (I'll refrain from using this term best as I can over the remainder of this article).

There's no question of Spall committing to the role: beyond the unique aspects of the performance already pointed out, in the two years leading to Turner's production Spall learned how to paint to the point that he could copy a full Turner painting (Snow Storm - Steam-Boat off a Harbour's Mouth) in oil. But why did Leigh choose him for this pointedly unpolished part? As much as Leigh puts himself into Turner, Spall makes sense as a surrogate for a director known for his gloriously blunt, sometimes mercurial personality and bulldog looks (the only portrayal that even comes close to a Leigh surrogate - and certainly not a physical one - would be Allan Corduner's Arthur Sullivan in Topsy-Turvy).

Other than the obvious reason that Spall as an actor can't not be interesting, he's one of the few screen performers able to appear graceful and slovenly at the same time, a distinction he shares with such auteur favorites as Klaus Kinski and Toshiro Mifune. The things that really appeal to Leigh - disappointment, misery, fatigue, resentment, misguided anger - are what Spall does best, but he also does tenderness and compassion better than anyone else. Other brilliant actors in Leigh's stable occupy one end of the spectrum or the other - Spall runs the whole gamut, and Turner is the ultimate culmination of all the roles they created together.

There's an amusing link between Spall's latest film with Leigh and his earliest. While at a gathering in the large home of rich benefactor John Ruskin, Turner is forced to sit through an unbearably banal dialogue about gooseberries. Do they prefer a warm or cold climate? Compared to the rhubarb, are they the more vigorous specimen? Do they taste better in Jerusalem or Scotland? From the rigidly irritated expression Spall plasters on Turner's face, the wall of social separation between himself and his insufferable, well-heeled patrons is laid thick and impenetrable.

In the first scene of Home Sweet Home, Spall's Gordon Leach is presented with a question: What's the difference between an elephant and a gooseberry? It's one in a series of several lame jokes delivered by fellow postal worker Harold Fish, who like so many of Leigh's characters attempting to endear themselves to others with ceaseless prattling and charmingly inane banter remains undeterred by Gordon's complete lack of response. While not so pointedly defiant as Turner, Gordon doesn't humor the speaker with a phony chuckle or even an acknowledging nod. In fact he's just all-out befuddled; when Harold switches to actual conversation - "Does your wife get you up in the morning?" - Gordon thinks he's telling another joke and protests that he doesn't get it.

The difference between an elephant and a gooseberry turns out to be that an elephant is grey and a gooseberry is green. But it's interesting to consider the same question in the context of Mr. Turner, in which Hannibal's elephant is something majestic in life and among the annals of history that's been marginalized to near imperceptibility by the painter. The gooseberry is a tiny fruit of trivial concern turned into a momentous subject by the most mundane of people. Home Sweet Home revolves around the lives of folks who make big deals about trivial things while practically ignoring serious issues.

Like Mr. Turner, Spall is in the opening shot of this film, not frozen in time and shot from a distance but active in the foreground, driving a motorbike straight at the camera. It's an interesting place to start with Gordon Leach, who throughout a good portion of the film can be found barely conscious on the couch of his flat or perched on a stool half-mindedly sorting letters to distribute among identical slots at the Hitchin post office.⁵ The next time Leigh would open a film like this, it would be Sally Hawkins as Poppy in Happy-Go-Lucky pedaling her ill-fated bike with nothing but pleasant ambitions for the road ahead. Despite the similar-sounding titles of the two films, Gordon couldn't be more exactly opposite from Poppy: his trip isn't taking him to a future of infinite opportunities but to the same place he goes every day, trapped in a predictable routine to which he's just barely adhering. When he's using a bicycle on his mail route, Gordon can't even get the bloody thing to stand up. You get the feeling he'd be relieved to have it stolen.⁶

Televised in 1982, Home Sweet Home was the last of six films Leigh made for the BBC anthology series "Play for Today" and is by far the best and most ambitious of them. While not as fondly remembered as Nuts in May or Abigail's Party, it's a breakthrough for Leigh and his application of the narrative structure "two couples and a single person on the outside." In both Nuts and Party, the withdrawn single person (a young student in Nuts, a divorcee in Party) is trapped between two sets of characters in less-than-perfect relationships who are slowly driving each other crazy. In 1980's Grown-Ups, Brenda Blethryn's Gloria manages to terrorize two neighboring husband & wife teams into coming to terms with the resentments threatening their respective unions. Grown-Ups was Leigh's first step towards interconnecting the lives of couples with a third party and throwing them into a series of conflicts that eventually lead to an acceptance of truth, a process that would inform such major works as Secrets & Lies.

He moved closer to perfecting the structure with Home Sweet Home by introducing Gordon and Harold's co-worker Stan, who quickly takes over as the main character despite Gordon opening the film. We meet Stan at a point in his life where he's had everyone removed from it: his wife has left him, his mother has died and his introverted teenage daughter is growing up in a care home. Stan seems perfectly content being alone, his ambitions being no greater than smoking cigarettes, listening to Frank Sinatra records and seducing women around town. He's having an intermittent affair with Harold's wife June and being groomed as a possible noontime lover for Gordon's wife Hazel. Stan seems to get off on belittling and one-upping his work colleagues (he even brags to a dumbfounded Gordon that Hazel showed him their bedroom when he dropped over for tea), which may very well be the entire point of his conquest of their spouses.

Hazel and June, unaware of each other until the end of the film, are both childless women with big kids for husbands. Harold is pleasant to the point of being completely removed from reality, communicating mainly through cheesy jokes and quoting lyrics of pop songs much to June's annoyance. Gordon can barely take care of himself, disheveled in baggy clothes and offering only complaints to Hazel as he sits around the house doing nothing while she cooks and tidies up. The dynamic of their relationship is characterized by her boast to have recently lost four stone, and winding him up by calling him fat. ("I ain't fat. I ain't fat!") Hazel's abuse of Gordon and flirtation with Stan come from superficial pride at her recent weight loss (which has also made her feel entitled to an extra biscuit at tea) and frustration over Gordon's disinterest in changing himself.

Ridiculous as it sounds, this friction actually keeps the marriage going. Compared to Harold and June, who have an unhealthy situation where the husband is unable or perhaps unwilling to recognize his wife's unhappiness, Gordon and Hazel keep a fire going in their relationship by passionately arguing with one another, reminiscent of newlywed couple Dick and Mandy in Grown-Ups: you believe that either couple could sort things out long enough to have a kid and continue to be miserable for the rest of their lives. Harold and June's marriage has no chance, with him oblivious to her need for attention and her withdrawing into the fantasy of romance novels - their relationship is long dead, even if nobody's called it. Leigh has wedding photos of Harold and June in the kitchen, standing like a memorial in the background. In Mr. Turner, the artist opts to have his photo taken at the same time he feels himself being phased out of existence, leaving it behind on Mrs. Booth's mantle. Gordon and Hazel don't have any pictures around the house, suggesting that their union isn't necessarily past the point of no return. But Stan keeps a picture of daughter Tina on top of his TV: another dead relationship.

Tina appears in the third act, and nearly every shot she's in feels like actress Lorraine Brunning is waiting for Leigh to shout, "Action!" Tina is one of Leigh's lost souls, an emotionally stilted individual who seems to have given up on everything: no strong convictions, no hang-ups, no ambitions or expectations. Tim Roth's Colin Pollock in Meantime is probably the best example, but it's mostly young adult daughters who fit this type in Leigh's work: Charlene in The Short and Curlies, Rachel in All or Nothing, Ethel in Vera Drake. They all seem to be trying to will themselves out of existence, giving only the most perfunctory responses to other people and offering no defense when they're attacked. Although Tina is still a teenager, her deep retraction from the world gives her a quiet maturity, especially among the childlike adults misbehaving on all sides. Sitting silently in a chair as the older characters flip out and argue makes her seem like the nearly catatonic Mrs. Bender in High Hopes, during that film's similarly awkward gathering that devolves into a shouting match.

The tragedy of Tina is that Stan has effectively cut her out of his life, having made the decision some point after the dissolution of his own marriage to turn his home into a bachelor pad (like Turner, his isolation is a very deliberate construct). In their scenes together it's apparent that Stan cares about his daughter, but has completely lost interest in having a relationship with her. That Tina has accepted this is what makes it heartbreaking: her melancholy that's not exactly depression seems to be a sad acknowledgment that family connections don't actually mean anything. We see Harold (who barely meets Tina) degenerate into this state over a climatic scene where June reveals her infidelity, much to his astonishment. By the end of the scene, he seems to have come to the same sad realization that he, in relation to the woman he lives with, does not actually exist. The last we see of him, Harold's good-natured chatter is gone, as his expression turns to the kind of woeful resignation we've seen on Tina's face.

Gordon, whose perpetual state is blankness, also tends to retreat to the nearest chair where he can ignore everyone else, including Tina, whom he mistakenly calls "Theresa." His is a case of incurable lethargy: he's knackered from his daily trip up the hill on Hollow Lane, refuses to go out socially if he hasn't had a kip yet and exerts most of his energy to complain that his trousers are cutting him. But he's not so removed as to miss something of himself in the withdrawn Tina, taking advantage of a moment alone with her to ask how old she is. When Tina answers that she's 14, Gordon pauses reflectively before saying, "I started work when I was 15." Something about learning Tina's age has struck a nerve, causing 25-year-old Timothy Spall to make a face like 57-year-old Timothy Spall when JMW Turner becomes strangely effected to learn the prostitute he's sketching ("Eliza or Liza?") is 22.

As if suddenly made aware of the education and opportunities that have passed him by, Gordon's short time with Tina has the opposite reaction to Harold's: he comes to life for the first time in the movie. When Hazel, furious to have discovered Stan's affair with June, starts digging into Tina about her appearance and violently brushing her hair, Gordon leaps to the girl's defense ("She ain't five! You want to stop sticking your nose up people's bleeding arseholes, don't ya?"), ultimately tearing the brush out of his wife's hands and chasing her out of the film, screaming all the way back home. Vicious though the scene might be, it's also sort of magical: in a fantasy suburban scenario, Tina has become the teenaged daughter of Gordon and Hazel, shoved back and forth between them.

Hazel can't be blamed for her mothering of Tina, which goes from criticizing her lack of friends to reprimanding her for not cleaning up when it's time for Tina to return to the group home. Hazel belongs in the category of Mike Leigh wives without children who've put their energy elsewhere in order to fill the void, along with April in Who's Who (fosters cats), Christine Butcher in Grown-Ups (dedicates herself to teaching), Barbara Lake in Meantime (tries to reach out to her hopeless nephew), Valerie in High Hopes (does aerobics), Monica Purley in Secrets & Lies (obsesses over housekeeping) and Kitty in Topsy-Turvy (supports her needy husband's work). Hazel (who it should be noted does work part time at a grocery store) sets her sights to a slow seduction of Stan, but goes about it by attempting to prove her worth as a capable homemaker, at one point making a show of furiously shaking out a carpet in front of him, to great comedic effect.

Her interest in Stan largely draws from not getting what she needs from Gordon (June complains to Harold that she still considers herself "desirable," Hazel obviously feels the same way about herself), although it seems to peak at the idea of his being a father. Tina's presence is what unravels the carefully laid roles Stan has set for the people in his life, not only stealing the movie away from Gordon (as if Gordon could ever carry the movie) but manipulating a kind of role reversal where he suggests to Hazel that Gordon must be a ferret.

'Ferret' is an odd British colloquialism that means 'philanderer' but its more common definition suits Gordon: something that's underground and relies on other beings. In the case of wild ferrets, prairie dogs who do most of the actual tunneling of burrows which become the ferret's home after devouring the previous tenant - they exist only at the expense of another animal. Hazel expresses doubt that Gordon is a housewife-hoping ferret (she knows from experience he doesn't have the energy) but might Gordon as the kind of ferret that's dug itself into her burrow and made itself comfortable.

Because what is a home? The resentment from the male perspective is that he does the work to pay for the dwelling, but really it's the female's home because she's the one who takes care of it. Every time Gordon is at home, it seems to Hazel like an invasion of her habitat (it's certainly the way June sees Harold's presence when he returns). Gordon probably thinks that he's in charge and can hibernate within the walls of the house because his labor is the reason it exists at all. He doesn't understand that he's been turned into a domesticated pet; in one very telling moment he's nodding off with his mouth open on the chair, having gotten properly soused at the pub and eating himself into a food coma even though he has guests sitting right next to him. Hazel approaches and gives him a loving rub on the head to ask if he wants to go for a walk. When he doesn't respond, she slaps him on the head! And he still doesn't want to go. This is more like an owner dealing with a stubborn pet than a fed up wife with a sluggish husband.

And like a domesticated animal, the dyspeptic Gordon seems to believe that food is what you need to be happy, where your energy should be focused. His time away from work seems entirely food-based: on lunch Stan runs into him eating a sandwich at a canteen, he's heard to complain that peas make him fart, and he takes a moment in the middle of Saturday brunch to advise Hazel, Stan and Tina: "Eat as much as you can. Don't hesitate. Don't leave what you can't eat." A recently empty plate fits very nicely in Gordon Leach's view of life: gorged and content, free to sink back into an easy chair until it's time to start the whole show over tomorrow.

Before filming Life is Sweet, Spall joined the cast of Leigh's play Smelling a Rat, which debuted at the Hampstead Theatre in December of 1988 and also featured Eric Allan (Bleak Moments, Nuts in May, Leigh's plays Babies Grow Old and Too Much of a Good Thing), Brid Brennan (Four Days in July, Topsy-Turvy), Greg Cruttwell (Jeremy in Naked) and Saskia Reeves (Lady Jessica in Frank Herbert's Dune).

Spall played Victor "Vic" Maggott, a rodent operative working for Vermination Pest Control who has been tasked to enter his employer Rex's posh flat one late night after Boxing Day to check on things while his boss is on vacation. Little does he realize, Rex has come home early and ducked into a giant wardrobe after hearing Vic and his wife Charmaine enter the boudoir. Following a bit of back-and-forth between the couple (including several things best said outside Rex's hearing), they are also forced to hide when Rex's son Rocky unexpectedly shows up with nervous girlfriend Melanie-Jane. The second act amps up the farce as all concealed parties are revealed and Vic & Charmaine try desperately to explain themselves and exit the situation without Vic losing his job or getting arrested.

Despite the single setting, the audience gets the full picture of Vic as a blue collar bloke who feels the crushing weight of his employer's boot. He feels that he's "a cog in the wheel of Capitalism," and even complains to Charmaine that Rex is some sort a greedy megalomaniac, stirring up 'entomophobic parapsychosis' in the public just to drum up more business. Vic differs from Rex on several ethical business attitudes, feeling for one thing that it's unethical to eradicate spiders as they're not a subject of public health significance (a "non-target species") just for the money. Vic is strongly opinionated but keeps these thoughts from Rex, fearing the uncovering of some legal trouble as a kid (he fell in with bad crew who burned down a warehouse full of fur coats and spent some time in Borstal) will cost him his job. Of course, Rex hears of all this from his concealed position.

Seeing as how it's impossible to view a play from 30 years ago, the characters only exist on paper. Since Vic is such a perfect role for Spall, it's easy to match his face to the words, and it's not hard to imagine Brid Brennan - so memorable in Leigh's Four Days in July - knocking it out of the park as Charmaine, his wife of six years. Because Rex and Rock do very little talking, essentially everything we know about their characters comes from dialogue between Vic and Charmaine, and they can't turn themselves off once they're in the company of the very people they've been slagging in 'private', leading to lots of nervous rambling from Vic: "'Cos the truth is, it isn't what it ain't, 'cos it ain't what it isn't; inasmuch it ain't what it looks like, 'cos it ain't. 'Cos it is what it is, and it ain't what it ain't. Is it? Charmaine?"

In anticipation of his next film role for Leigh, Spall's Rex uses a lot of fancy words he doesn't understand (he calls Rex's wife a 'dipsomaniac' when he means 'nymphomaniac'), spouts clichés that have only a vague connection to the current situation and mentions that Christmas time makes him think of the war - he wasn't in the war, he's just read about it and seen it on telly. "Vic is a celebration of a guy who reads a lot of books, has a vocabulary, is an individual, enjoys language even if he may get it a bit wrong," according to Leigh. "Our experiments with language, especially in my collaboration with Tim Spall in the creation of Maggott, are achievements of which I am extremely proud." A good example of this achievement is one of Vic's anxious monologues:

"A rabbit...a rabbit...strolls out of a 'edge in a country lane...mindin' 'is own business in the pitch black; stands in the middle of the road, scratchin' 'is arse, thinkin' about the Meanin' of Life. All of a sudden, without warnin', a car, doin' a thousand miles an hour, 'urtles towards 'im; does 'e 'op it? - no, o' course not; 'e stands there, inasmuch spiflicated. In a trance. Like a moron. Hypnotised. By its 'eadlights. Frozen, like a packet of peas. [Makes death noise.] Dead."

It's amusing that Spall went from 'Leach' to 'Maggott' in the Mike Leigh canon, although 'Maggott' might be one of Leigh's more on-the-nose character namings, as Vic undoubtedly feels like the lowest form of undeveloped insect life while, consequently, being tasked with ridding the world of these sort of creatures. Leigh calls Smelling a Rat "a play of morals, ambiguous though its morals may be" and the moral decision comes when Vic - subservient and sucking up the entire time but emboldened by Charmaine's refusal to be intimidated - unexpectedly takes a stand against Rex's verbal abuse of his son Rocky: "Why don't you fucking leave 'im alone, you big bully?"

This comes at about the same point in the story as in Home Sweet Home when Gordon moves to defend Tina from Hazel, and the change in the character is just as palpable. Vic's not a maggot, or a rat for that matter, although it's funny that he'd go on to voice Nick the Rat (with Meantime's Phil Daniels as his partner and Jane Horrocks and a pre-Leigh Imelda Staunton among the voice cast) in Aardman's Chicken Run, and to play a villain who transforms into a rat (and is exposed by none other than Leigh collaborators Gary Oldman and David Thewlis, who shouts "I smell a rat!") in the third Harry Potter movie. Vic's more like the rabbit, who goes from minding his own business, thinking about the meaning of everything, to be spiflicated by the headlights of life. Years of groveling have gotten him nowhere, speaking his mind and standing up to his boss have finally revealed the man who's remained hidden behind the scared rabbit.

Life is Sweet's Aubrey has no boss, being inasmuch a self-made man. The question is, what is he made of? When you hear him described by Leigh as "the worst example of received-behavior characters in my whole canon," you have to wonder exactly what's been received and how it somehow inspired the behavior of this insane idiot. Most of the time he comes off like an overeager man-child, proudly displaying his drumming skills and what Alison Steadman's Wendy refers to as a "proper boy's room," a mess of posters with cheesy bands and the famous "Athena tennis girl" revealing her bare backside, with such enthusiasm he flails off the "orffipedic" bed onto the floor. This same sophomoric lummox has somehow managed to put together the high-end bistro Regret Rien, aesthetically inspired by Edith Piaf and promising to bring "tres exclusive" fare to the populace of Enfield.

But the restaurant interior is just an extension of his puerile sensibility, decorated with a cat's head, a gas mask, broken accordions, a filthy-looking water tank full of plastic fish, empty bird cages to "symbolize the Sparrow" and even a random half a He-Man toy. Seeing him behind the bar of his chintzy dream eatery decked out in a tacky tuxedo/smoking jacket combo makes him seem even more clueless and out of place than his established ensemble. The yellow t-shirt covering a bulbous gut sticking out of a silver Giants jacket, rotating baseball caps with oversized brim and giant red-framed novelty glasses all suggest an awareness of hip hop culture without a clue as to what it actually is. These "transatlantic influences" as Leigh calls them represent a cobbling of characteristics, like Aubrey strung together a synthetic personality from ideas that he thinks are cool or trendy or "genius," none of which connect with the man himself. He takes in everything but doesn't know what to do with it.

Aubrey enters the film comically snug in an tiny red convertible, squeezing out of it in front of the home of Andy & Wendy and their two adult daughters Natalie and Nicola (every character in the film is curiously stripped of surname) on the flimsy pretense of delivering a pineapple. Sandwiched between Brenda Blethryn's Gloria from Grown-Ups and Lesley Manville's Mary from Another Year, he serves structurally as one of Leigh's third party characters who somewhat forcefully install themselves into a family's life and overcompensate to endear themselves to the household, except his relationship with them is so strange.

Like the wandering Wayne in High Hopes, Aubrey seems dysfunctional as an adult and clings to Andy & Wendy as if they were surrogate parents he hopes to impress and relies on to survive. At the suggestion that he take them for a tour of the restaurant, Aubrey responds by saying, "Yeah yeah yeah yeah!" like a toddler. While the couple themselves are notably immature for their age (she never misses a chance for a lewd reference, he does Goon Show impressions), they mostly try to give Aubrey helpful advice the way a grown-up would a child. When they do things like share an exchange over one of Aubrey's porno rags in his bedroom, it seems more like they just consider him their kooky friend who amuses them (similar to Another Year's Tom & Gerri, who seem to enjoy collecting eccentric loners).

At first it's baffling how Andy & Wendy even know him, until it's revealed that Andy and Aubrey are both cooks: they presumably used to work together at the same kitchen, maybe even the industrial kitchen where Andy is currently chief chef. Aubrey has managed to leave that world (or possibly been asked to leave), somehow gotten enough money to purchase a Spitfire Triumph and set himself up in business. Dismissive though he may be about the Regret Rien's chance of success, Andy must feel a certain envy for his bizarre friend, given that he clearly hates working at the kitchen and jumps at the opportunity when his shady drinking buddy Patsy offers to sell him a rickety old Hot Snacks caravan.

It's impossible not to tap into Andy's excitement over the romantic possibilities of becoming his own boss and heading out on the road in his freshly-painted mobile diner, but his expert procrastination at fixing things around the house spells doom for that venture ever seeing the light of day. It would take an outside twist of fate (no pun intended) for Andy to change his life. The Regret Rien may be an imminent flop, but the caravan is unlikely to even get the chance to fail.

With these quixotic figures, Leigh examines two different sides of entrepreneurialism: the responsible man who'll never follow through with his goals, and the irrational man who'll follow them right over a cliff. Aubrey, being "mega-confident" in his restaurant, speaks about its impact on the community with the aggressive enthusiasm of a studio executive trying way too hard to sell investors on another live action Chipmunks movie. Leigh has acknowledged that the development of Aubrey was at least a little inspired by his impression of people in the movie business - "a kind of manic, crazy commitment combined with a sort of underlying menace" - and Regret Rien is Aubrey's Heaven's Gate.

He sneers at Andy's food caravan with its shabby presentation, but the restaurant, like himself, is all presentation, an assemblage of knick knacks and curios that suggest high end decor yet mean nothing. Confident the nouvelle-cuisine eatery will gain a "one-to-one mouth-to-mouth reputation," Aubrey has neglected to print menus, advertise or employ a reliable staff. He couldn't run a proper business to save his life, the epitome of the character being his confession that he's tried to make a line of candles sticking out the tops of bottles the same length but keeps forgetting to blow them out.

Aubrey's belief that people should want to come to his restaurant just because it looks like a restaurant and serves what sounds like the things English people find appetizing omits the very thing that fuels vitality - the food itself. The title of the movie suggests the sweet taste of living, and of course shares its adjective with Leigh and Spall's previous film together. Life's two most intriguing characters don't subscribe to Gordon Leach's philosophy that one should "eat as much as you can" to be content, quite the opposite in fact. Life at its core is the story of three sorts of indigestable food (that indeed, we never see properly ingested). The greasy burgers and eggs promised on the side of Andy's caravan. The vomitous menu of the Regret Rien. The cache of chocolate confections Nicola scarfs down only to heave back up (and the chocolate spread she covers himself with that makes her lover sick). Nicola makes a funny comment that people who come to Aubrey's restaurant might not want to eat anything, an early clue to her struggle with bulimia, which her sister Natalie (who as a plumber deals directly with the aftermath of eating) finds ridiculous. But Aubrey isn't the slightest bit concerned, shrugging it off with "No mangiare, no sweat." He really believes that customers will come to his food-serving business with no intention to order food, assured that they can "bask in the atmosphere" if they don’t want to eat.

Just as Andy and Aubrey are unlikely parallel versions of the same independent businessman, Aubrey and Nicola are bizarrely connected by this psychotic idea that food is not for eating. Aubrey makes food nobody would ever want to eat, Nicola won't eat anything - they'd theoretically make the perfect pair, if only because both are destined for destruction. Nicola is a jumble of self-applied political labels, the ideologies of which don't have anything to do with each other much less Nicola herself. It feels correct to her to call herself a feminist and accuse others of being racist fascists because that's what she knows will antagonize her family and set herself apart from them; as she picks at her untouched lunch, Natalie demands, "You want to be with us, so why don’t you just act normal?" Even though Natalie is aware of Nicola's eating disorder, she doesn't put together that her sister's social isolation, under the veneer of civil unrest, is a symptom of the disease: to eat would be to lower herself to all the other boring, normal people. Likewise, Aubrey can't decide what kind of person is worthy of his great culinary vision, sabotaging his own efforts by including no one, preparing to serve food that is inedible to a non-existent clientele.

Aubrey probably doesn't realize he's accidentally diagnosing someone with a severe eating disorder when he tells Nicola: "Fat. What is fat? It's all in the mind." What he is doing is perfectly expressing what these two characters have in common. Nothing about how Aubrey perceives himself matches what he really is: a white guy with a hip-hop fashion aesthetic, a large guy in a tiny car, a grown man living in a "proper boy's room," a restaurant owner with no sense of business, a lothario lacking any hint of charisma. His scene with Nicola is uncomfortably predatory - he admires Nicola's knees and later Wendy's hands, because naturally Aubrey is going to notice superficial qualities in others - and while there's little doubt he's attracted to her,⁷ deep down there may be a recognition of what's familiar about this twitchy thing in a "Bollocks to the Poll Tax" t-shirt. The first time these characters meet in the film, Aubrey misidentifies Nicola as "Natalie," just as Gordon referred to Tina by the wrong name in Home Sweet Home. Here, Spall's character is once again seeing himself in a young woman although he's probably not the least bit aware of it.

The other link between these two characters who have no use for food as sustenance is their independent mingling of food and sex. This is indicated early on by Aubrey's nervous passing of a large pineapple between his open legs as he leers at Nicola on the couch, later put into practice when we learn that Nicola is in the habit of ordering her lover (David Thewlis) to lick up Nutella smeared across her chest and witness Aubrey seduce his sous-chef/"dogsbody" Paula in the kitchen over a pile of sheep tongues just before inserting his own wanton tongue into her ear. Nicola's sexual act is clearly part of her condition, her fascination/repulsion at the act of gorging symptomatic of issues with her physical appearance, although outwardly it also has a lot to do with control: she rejects the food prepared by Wendy for the family and only "eats" on her own terms as a way to convince herself that she's in charge of her life. That extends to being in charge of the relationship, but Thewlis can only see all this as a weird kink, not as Nicola's way to give him what she thinks he needs. People need food, Aubrey and Nicola need people to need them.

Though he never actually does it, serving food is important to Aubrey, from delivering a pineapple to offering his unique haute cuisine to the town and, of course, sharing his mastery of people's dietary need with Paula as he strips skin off grey lamb tongues. Even outside the kitchen, Aubrey plies Paula with wine while making her play on his drum kit, filling her up without giving her food. Paula (who he calls "Pauline" - another wrong name for a young lady; is he possibly pushing the name further away from "Nicola"?) is surprisingly responsive to Aubrey's advances; at first it appears that she's too sad or bored to care what happens to her, but she seems genuinely interested when Aubrey promises to take her for fish & chips after closing on the Regret Rien's opening night.

After he's passed out on the floor at the end of that disastrous evening, she still holds out a hope that they'll go for fish 'n chips, a dish Aubrey's ironically attributed to the low tastes of "fishwives and footballers" in his drunken rant outside the restaurant (and obviously looks down on Andy's caravan for selling). She even clarifies to Wendy that it's not the fish & chips she wants. It means something because Aubrey actually wants to go out and eat proper food, and buy food for Paula, as part of a proper date - it might even mean something deeper to him. When she tells Wendy, "He'll be hungry when he wakes up, won't he? Stands to reason," she's holding out hope for him.

"I'm not just a wanker, y'know?" he tells Paula, having moved intimately close. "I could teach you things you never ever dreamed of. I'm a magician." It makes sense that Aubrey relates to a magician: he has an assistant, outlandish costumes, he's overly fond of props. But what he knows about magicians is what any of us know: what he sees on the stage. For Aubrey, a magician appears, does tricks and then exits. Aubrey would never have even considered what goes on behind the scenes, how a professional magician spends years honing his skill, perfecting his craft and learning everything there is to know about how to present himself before he sets one foot onto a stage. Yet ironically all that exists for Aubrey is the backstage: his restaurant remains free of customers, and he's left holding a rabbit by its ears to a theater full of empty seats.

Paula's weird devotion to Aubrey at the end of the night puts one in mind of the similarly withdrawn Hannah Danby sticking with Turner despite his gross behavior, abhorrent treatment of her (Aubrey sure is gross and grabby like Turner) and her silent jealousy of other women in his life. And if Paula (played by Moya Brady, who just reteamed with Leigh on Peterloo) is Aubrey's Hannah Danby, then Wendy is the sunny Sophia Booth in his life, or the Mary Somerville - the woman who gets treated like royalty...or, like a person. Wendy, the only of the three older characters who is not a professional cook, is also the only one we see preparing edible, life-sustaining food, a job she volunteers to do for Aubrey when his waitress runs off.

She's the Poppy character, dancing around with kids similar to the Happy-Go-Lucky heroine flapping her wings and squacking along with pupils in their bird costumes, doing what she can to make others happy. Her own cheerfulness leads to some accidental condescension - treating Paula like a little kid, imitating Aubrey's gruff accent with Andy at home, losing patience with Nicola and telling her to shut up - and makes her blind to her own little failures. We see how at her (presumably) regular day job in the children's clothing store Bunnikins, she attempts to sell a tacky sailor's outfit to a woman looking for a "dignified" suit for her toddler to wear to an upcoming wedding, and how her own idea of what "sophisticated" people are looking for doesn't quite sync with reality. (Aubrey stressing that he wouldn't want to attract "the wrong sort of people" by advertising in Bunnikins is one of the funniest lines in the film.) Then we have the Mike Leigh portrait/memorial moment again as Wendy looks longingly at photos of her baby twins on the mantle, lamenting how much they've changed from the days of infancy.

Still, Wendy's most prominent qualities are her patience and good nature, both of which are tested when she's a one-woman audience to Aubrey's breakdown at the empty restaurant. This sequence of the film becomes the first party/date/social gathering of Mike Leigh's third act for which nobody shows up, even though it's every bit the full-blown disaster seen in Bleak Moments, Abigail's Party, Who's Who, Home Sweet Home, High Hopes and Secrets and Lies (notably, three of these involve Timothy Spall shouting at everyone else). Wendy is powerless to stop the proprietor of the Regret Rien as he stands fully soused outside the front of his business berating the "fucking yuppies" and "working class morons" who failed to support his vision.

She's forced to defend herself when Aubrey begins a series of vulgar passes; rejected, he knocks over tables and ornaments from the wall and removes his pants and jacket while muttering that he wants Andy to have it⁸ (just like Gordon Leach, Aubrey boasts loudly and slurrily of his "best friend.") Another indignant ending for a Spalleigh character, Aubrey comes to rest sprawled out on the floor wearing possibly the most disturbing underwear ever captured on film - tight, striped jockeys that make it look like he has a multicolored vagina - sucking his thumb and calling out Nicola's name. Again, this could be read as sexual longing (the thumb-sucking seems to suggest as much), but it could be that a subconscious connection to Wendy's daughter (he even calls Wendy "Nicola" during his humiliating drunken dance) has lingered in Aubrey's mind.

My colleague Chris Funderburg has previously written about Life is Sweet on this here site, and what he says about Aubrey is more articulate and insightful than anything I could ever hope to offer⁹:

"He's the human representation of the power of hope, of the value of self-confidence, of believing against belief in your impossible dreams. To see how easily these dreams can be punctured, how pathetic those punctures can leave us, feels tragic right up until it turns ugly. In a flash, Leigh shows us how crushed hope can bring out the most grotesque awfulness in humanity - even the man who has it all figured out is at heart pitiable and base in the face of fate's cruelties and his own self-deception. But that's the choice: the delusional dreams of tongues in rhubarb hollandaise or the lifeless reality being a plumber's assistant."

Poor Wendy has to return home and go through the whole thing all over again after finding Andy home from the pub, collapsed in his culinary venture and dragging yet another drunk idiot from the caravan to the bedroom. Leigh has made another correlation between Andy and Aubrey here, and it's funny that, in the subsequent heart-wrenching scene where a fully exasperated Wendy decides to have it out with Nicola, she uses Andy as an example of someone who still has a dream and goes out there to try and make it happen, referring to the bleeding caravan! Isn't Aubrey someone who tried to make his dream happen? Sure he failed spectacularly, but it's obvious that Andy won't even make it that far. Then again, the last thing Wendy wants after her experience at Regret Rien is to suggest Aubrey as a role model for Nicola, just as she's breaking down her wretched daughter's assumed political posturing and the emotional wall between her and the rest of the family.

Andy ends up being serendipitously maimed at work, which puts an apparent end to his earlier vow to stop by Aubrey's and "tell him he was out of order." In the end Aubrey is airily discarded, Spall's character once again written out of the movie before its conclusion. The focus shifts back to the sisters, with Natalie offering Nicola money as an interesting contrast to Stan offering Tina money at the end of Home Sweet Home. Giving Tina money showed that Stan, while he may be trying, has no idea how to have a relationship with his daughter and his guilt over that leads to what could almost be seen as a bribe so he doesn't have to see her again any time soon. It is unbearably sad.

Natalie offering Nicola money is the opposite: we've only seen her rejecting her sister's request for funds throughout the film, and coming after an honest discussion in which Natalie reveals she knows about Nicola's eating disorder and suggests she discuss it with Andy & Wendy, the lending of cash is an offer of support. Oddly enough this monetary support comes from the very thing that makes Natalie feel "disgusting," putting her hand down toilets all day at her job as a plumber, as a way of saving Nicola from her "disgusting" disorder. It's a wonderful final scene that acknowledges the very Leigh sentiment that people never fully change, but their relationship to others can, and for the best.

A fence that Mike Leigh has balanced atop for his entire career is the divide between comedy that comes from well-developed roles and one-dimensional caricature. While Leigh's often able to avoid full-on satire with his crazier characters, he has stated that he feels uncomfortable with Life is Sweet in terms of the "distinction of the question of performances and what goes on." More specifically, he's been critical of his handling of the film's big comic set piece:

"All the stuff about the Regret Rien restaurant and Aubrey is inherently funny and plainly has something to say about entrepreneurial activity - apart from all the other stuff about individuals and isolation - but if I'm honest there's a degree of strain on my part in my rendering of that side of the story."

Leigh, who on the 2013 commentary admits that Life is Sweet is his least favorite of his own movies(!), is being too hard on himself. Aubrey is the most larger-than-life personality to appear in a Mike Leigh film, and would successfully run away with it were the other characters not sufficiently strong. Aubrey is identifiable in ways that aren't easy to justify; Spall's hilarious performance makes it so that even the drunken sexual assault on Wendy is hard not to laugh at even while it's never comfortable to watch. He's complicated in ways that makes him frustrating and fascinating to write about, especially considering his personality is bored from so many eclectic and unrelated sources. At the end of the day, it's his misfit charm that makes him funny and sympathetic - that feeling of not belonging that we've all experienced causes us to laugh at Aubrey in his ridiculous gear, his tiny car and his pseudo-posh restaurant, and his obliviousness to his own incongruity sells the audience on a character who truly regrets nothing. Back to Leigh:

"Sympathizing or empathizing with Aubrey the character [as opposed to liking him] is a whole different matter. There is an Aubrey in all of us. He is desperately sad. He really has all these aspirations, but his fear renders him dysfunctional. The only moment, paradoxically, when he knows what he's doing and is in focus in some way is when he's seducing Paula with the drums. Which is not a moment when you particularly love him. Most of the time he doesn't know what he's doing. People say, 'He's a caricature! There's nobody like that in the world!' - sorry, I've got news for you."

Life is Sweet was a new start for the director, being the first movie shot by Dick Pope and the first one produced by Leigh's Thin Man Films. Although there's been no lack of thin men in Leigh's movies (David Thewlis, Greg Cruttwell, Martin Savage), his world really belongs to the pudgy (Phil Davis, Jim Broadbent, Eddie Marsan) and the corpulent (Peter Wight, Mark Benton, James Corden in All or Nothing). With his incredible collaboration on Life is Sweet, Timothy Spall had staked a claim as Leigh's unpolished prince of the portly.