Every so often, the British writer-director Mike Leigh makes a movie in which the stars — and the tartly casual dramatic scenes — line up, coalescing into a full-on vision of prickly humanity. It happened in “Secrets & Lies” (1996), admittedly a kind of “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” for the art-house crowd, though in its neorealist-sitcom way it was a movie that fired on all cylinders. It happened in “Topsy-Turvy” (1999), Leigh’s sublime Gilbert and Sullivan biopic — easily his greatest film, which is quite the irony given that it’s the furthest he ever strayed from his working-class fixations. It happened, too, in “Another Year” (2010), his scaldingly funny riff on the melancholy of middle age.
“Tender Loving Care,” I’m compelled to report, is not one of those Leigh movies where it all comes together for him, fusing into a drama that’s greater than the sum of its parts. This one has a handful of vivid characters who are lively and touching company. The actors, as is always the case in a Mike Leigh film, inhabit their roles with uncanny everyday verve. You might say, “What’s not to like?” But Watching “Tender Loving Care,” I had the sense of wanting Leigh to go deeper into his characters — into the dreams holding their lives together, and the trauma underlying their daily grind. Leigh doesn’t make any wrong moves here; just about every scene in the movie plays. Yet “Tender Loving Care” builds (or maybe I should say recedes) to something more schematic than it is powerful.
The title sounds inviting, but what does it mean? It refers to about five different things at once, and that fuzziness is actually a bit of problem, in terms of cueing the audience to what the film is about. Amy (Kate O’Flynn), the spiky-on-the-surface but really quite winsome central character, and her best friend, the more merciless but superficial Rosie (Alice Bailey Johnson), are social workers, so they’ve dedicated their lives to helping people — but the tender loving care they offer is starting to fall on deaf ears. Amy has the look of a beaming nun: smiling, devotional, hair pulled back in a way that’s a touch prim. We see her attempt to engage one emotionally lost teen foster child after another, but they’re not engaging with her. Amy still cares, but does the system care? The background of the film is the budget slashes that are happening in this sector all over the Western world, as the government withdraws its own form of care.
“Tender loving care” also refers to how Amy and Rosie take care of each other. Amy has moved back into Rosie’s comfy apartment after five years, during which Amy was living with a man; but now he’s abandoned her and gone back to his wife in Glasgow. The two women start to hang out again like college pals, gossiping and hip-hip dancing and — always – splitting a bottle of white wine. They’ve been friends for decades and care deeply about each other. But do they care, in the right way, about themselves?
Amy’s aging parents are presented as the Platonic ideal of caring. They’re utterly conventional fuddy-duddy yobs who have always treated Amy, their only child, with kid gloves (and they still do, even though she’s 37). Marion Bailey, who plays the mum, is Leigh’s real-life partner, and she creates an infectious portrait of nattering devotion. But it’s Paul Jesson, as her husband (the character must be approaching 80 but looks even older), who makes the film’s most starkly moving impression. He’s the soul of decency, wrapped in a hard crust. He’s the kind of relative you love to see on holidays, because he doesn’t have much to say. But in his doddering way, he’s all there. (He tells jokes.) Until he isn’t. The onset of his dementia arrives slowly but surely (as these things tend to do), and Leigh is too sly a filmmaker to milk it. “Tender Loving Care” says to its audience: Yes, this happens. And when it does, the person you know is gone, just like that. (Jesson’s character starts talking about swans.) That, more than ever, is when we need care.
It’s an intermittently compelling, mildly affecting, in the end slightly scattershot movie. The reason I’m sounding a bit churlish about it is that it engages us without touching any hidden glimmer of mystery in its characters, any surprise perception of pain or desire. Amy and Rosie are intensely appealing women, yet their lives with men have been a washout. We think: Why? Is it because men are shits? That’s the conclusion the two seem to have come to, especially after the fireman Rosie has her current hopes pinned on asks her out to a fancy dinner date, only to stand her up. But this double lonely-hearts scenario is too sodden and limiting. Even if these women aren’t happy (or lucky in love), the film needed to give us a more developed feeling for what they want.
The most starkly powerful scene in the film is about motherhood. One of Amy’s charges is a mess of a young mother who has had all three of her children taken away from her by the state. She’s scared to talk to Amy because she thinks what she says will just be used against her. Is she right? What’s Leigh’s attitude here? It should have been clearer, but what comes across with utter force is the character’s life-and-death passion.
Amy needed a moment like that. Kate O’Flynn, from the TV series “Widow’s Bay,” is a commanding actor, but she doesn’t invest Amy with the power of a destiny laid bare. And that’s because Leigh isn’t totally invested in her destiny; he wants to tie it all into a larger “sociological” view. The film opens with Rosie interviewing an old demented homeless man in a hospital, and then, the morning after, he has vanished, fallen through the cracks of the system. He comes back at the end — and we can’t help but notice that he looks like the man Jesson’s character might have been, if he’d had no one to take care of him. I guess that makes a statement. But it’s an abstract statement. It tweaks our pieties rather than roiling our souls.
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