All or Nothing is a Limey flick that I was tricked into seeing because I think Timothy Spall is about the best actor at portraying the everyman. I still think that, but without anything interesting to do, his ability to play the average guy just looks like, well, watching an average guy.
In All or Nothing, Spall plays a lazy taxi driver in a loveless marriage with a couple of fat, lethargic and unhappy kids. They live hand to mouth in a rundown London housing project with equally unhappy neighbors. The characters plug along until, as always in the movies, a crisis requires them to re-examine why they are so unhappy and how they got there. The characters make an attempt to retrieve their lives from the shitter, and the movie ends with the big, poignant ambiguous ending. Will they find happiness or are they doomed to misery for eternity?
Despite excellent acting and a few powerful scenes, I mostly didn’t fucking care. These are boring, sad people, which is fine in itself so long as they have some revelation. They don’t, though. They just have miserable lives that plod along without exposing anything new. Director Mike Leigh has confused capturing poverty with poignance, and as anyone who has ever had to eat cat food can tell you, being poor just ain’t so interesting.
I love movies about average people, but what I love is for the characters to be “average” and not genuinely as dull and lame as the real average. I want them to subtly exceed the boundaries of the mundane and serve as inspiration, amusement or a lesson to the rest of us living in dingy apartments near railroad tracks. All or Nothing is too obsessed with filming shit to dig in and uncover the undigested kernels. I suppose Leigh can feel noble for training his talents and those of his actors on such shitty lives. Maybe it’s a tax writeoff. Otherwise, why bother?
If anyone needs to be entertained or given hope through the movies, it’s people like those Leigh depicts. But, there’s nothing here for them except a warning that their lives will continue to suck and I think they already knew that. Leigh is more interested in serving as the National Geographic of London’s ghettos for rich liberals than he is in improving lives. The fat rich folks watch it and cluck their tongues, and then feel good about themselves for having felt sorry for poor people.
All or Nothing is just unrelentingly depressing without a good reason, and I can get that by jerking off to too much Internet porn or eating Mrs. Filthy’s half of the Thanksgiving pies and then feeling like a jerk. Two Fingers.
Before I go off to make an experimental meringue from our carpet cleaner and more sugar, I want to give a plug for Denver’s Starz Theater in the old Tivoli building. Now here’s an art theater that isn’t so fucking impressed with itself as the snooty Landmark’s. Friendly employees, matinee prices up until six p.m. and Denver’s best schedule of retrospectives and older movies. If you live in Denver, fuck those pretentious assholes at the Mayan and the Esquire and support Starz. They try harder and they don’t act like their shit don’t stink.