Rent Life is Sweet (1990)

Mike Leigh gets darker - beautiful film - Life is Sweet review by CP Customer

This sees Mike Leigh delving a little deeper and a little darker than in some of his earlier films. The subject matter is loosely the same, a dysfunctional family living on the bread-line, with well drawn divisions between the characters. Lots of heart-aching and lots of laughter, this is a beautiful if uncomfortable modern-day saga. It is not a film that anyone should regret seeing.

saccharine - Life is Sweet review by JD

The beauty of this film is the characterisations. Some are quite bazaar but utterly convincing. The gentle interactions and reactions. The problem is that the plot rambles on never really in any way gripping and pulling the senses.

Nineties Zeitgeist. - Life is Sweet review by Steve

While the box office rewarded the gross-out comedy through the nineties, Mike Leigh continued to make acutely observed crystallisations of the state of England, often profound and with a huge emotional undertow.

Life is Sweet is set in Essex as Thatcher slipped out of power. Jim Broadbent is a comic figure, the man who got on his bike looking for work, who never gave up, but never really got anywhere. He has two daughters, the excellent Jane Horrocks as a secret bulimic, and Clare Skinner, a plumber who looks to America for cultural inspiration.

This film has a hero, the mother played by Alison Steadman who keeps all these diverse fragments together, showing resourcefulness and an eloquence that no one will ever recognise or reward because it is spent in the home. Steadman's performance is inspirational and hugely poignant, particularly in a scene where she tries to motivate a depressed Horrocks with a description of how her own life has played out; really the only time she shows her own heart, but selflessly and unsentimentally.

It is a superb portrayal by Steadman of a different kind of working class hero, the best part of what is otherwise already a fine film.