"Secrets & Lies" (1996), dir by Mike Leigh

English movie stars are the least attractive movie stars in the world – you think I'm going to mention the teeth, but I'm not; I don't care about the teeth, I'm tired of perfect, blindingly-white, slightly too big veneers winking out at me from every mouth on TV. I like messed up teeth just fine.

(Notice that Cary Grant moved to America before becoming a movie star. He was too good-looking to be an English movie star.)

English movie stars are unattractive because they allow themselves to be and represent and inhabit real people. The best of them don't play characters; they play people. People aren't pretty. Brenda Blethyn plays a whiny, annoying woman with a high-pitched whine of a voice who drinks too much and allows her grown daughter to treat her like shit while she collapses in tears on the bed. She wears ugly stretched flower pants over her lumpy bottom, topped with hideous crotched tops. These are real clothes that a woman like this would really wear; these are not clothes that a costume designer or stylists picked out, stealth chic like most American movies, where the clothing is an extension of the expertise and sophistication of the wardrobe department and an acknowledgement that we audience members want to see beautiful people being beautiful and pretend we can be like them no matter where we work or how much money we have. We may be a waitress in a diner, but we're really Michelle Pfeiffer. We may be a smart but trashy secretary, but we're really Julia Roberts. Maybe it has to do with the American bootstrap mentality, and our insistence that class is an illusion and wealth is a lottery ticket away. I don't think English people think that way; in fact, they “take the piss out” of those who do. It doesn't make them or us better, but it sure does make for a different kind of actor.

Director Mike Leigh won't work from a script; he truly collaborates with his actors to create the characters and map out the scenes, and the narrative cohesion and depth of his approach is stunning, partly in its contrast to the surface that most movies present to us, the indication of feeling rather than the reality of it. In this movie, Leigh collaborated with astonishing actors who had the guts to be ugly, both in looks and in feeling. The characters are unlikable, pathetic, even hateable in how awful they are to one another or how weak they seem to be, and how stubbornly stuck they are in their unhappy lives and destructive patterns. They can't communicate. They'd be better off without each other.

Wrong. This movie is an emotionally mature work with great compassion for its characters. It proves that confronting your problems, exposing your secrets and lies, can release you in ways you never thought possible. It also shows how incredibly difficult it is to do that.

Structurally, the movie sneaks up on you, slowly, imperceptibly (“organically”) revealing bits of the characters' lives and pasts and how they are intermingled and who relied on whom at what point and who sacrificed when and how the power and inner strength shifted over time. It lets you put the pieces together as the movie progresses, making you an actor in the storytelling. You become complicit, responsible somehow, in the long line of decisions that led to this day and this breaking point. You want desperately for them to work it out and be happy, because you know that they deserve it at long last. Maybe everybody does (not Hitler), maybe we just need to know more to feel more, maybe not, I don't know. Aren't some people just shits who need to go far away? No?

The people who made this movie love people; they are humanists in the strongest, bravest sense. They believe in human beings and in the power of kindness and love. They helped me get a little closer to believing in them, too.

And of course, these actors (Timothy Spall, Phyllis Logan, Blethyn, Claire Rushbrook, Marianne Jean-Baptiste) are beautiful. I just needed to look at them.