All or Nothing (18)

Doom with a view

"Life is divided up into the horrible and the miserable," says Woody Allen in Annie Hall. The horrible would involve being blind, he explains, or crippled, or terminally ill. And the miserable would be "everyone else". Such is the prevailing sensibility of Mike Leigh's All Or Nothing, apparent from the opening shot down the corridor of an old people's home: an elderly patient inches on a walker past a young woman, who swabs the floor in listless circles. The shot, which lasts for some minutes, serves notice: this way for the walking wounded.

After the period gaiety of Topsy-Turvy, we have been relocated, with a vengeance, to a milieu more in keeping with "a Mike Leigh film". All Or Nothing is set in a mean south-London housing estate, and follows a number of its inhabitants over a long weekend: in short, the horrible, as experienced by the miserable. At the hub of this carousel of woe is a taxi-driver named Phil (Timothy Spall) and his common-law wife Penny (Lesley Manville), who works at the Safeways checkout; their small flat is also home to their hugely overweight children, Rachel (Alison Garland), a careworker, and Rory (James Corden), who devotes his days to moping on the sofa.

Phil knows something is wrong with his life, but he's not sure what. His most immediate problem, as quickly becomes clear, is economic. Few scenes in recent cinema have conveyed the reality of needing money more poignantly than those in which Phil, owing his radio operator, shyly knocks on his daughter's bedroom door and asks if she can "spare some change". And the ungracious way his creditor snatches the money from him next morning simply sharpens the pain. Money exists here rather as it does in those Victorian social-protest novels; where the genteel poor used to take in needlework, now a woman earns a few pounds taking in ironing. And while some earn it laboriously, like Rachel cleaning up after incontinent pensioners, others spend it freely on supermarket booze: Phil's neighbours, Carol (Marion Bailey) and Ron (Paul Jesson), are fall-down drunks straight out of Dickens.

The essential difference between Leigh and Dickens – or between Leigh and Ken Loach, come to that – is that All Or Nothing isn't social protest. The film projects an almost entirely closed world; there is no hint of an upper-class keeping down a lower. Nor is there any suggestion that his characters aspire to a better social condition. The estate is just the place they live, not the place they must escape. Late in the film, Phil drives to the Kent coast, where he lingers for an afternoon; yet this isn't a scene about breaking free of the urban blight, it's merely a different setting for the contemplation of his loneliness.

What's striking about all this is how little the film offers as a counter-force to the gloom. Romance, for example, the one element that can be relied on to triumph over most obstacles, here makes a very poor showing. You'd have to look hard to find a more unpleasant suitor than Jason (Daniel Mays), a local brute who abuses his girlfriend Donna (Helen Coker) and then gloats boorishly about his recent infidelity. Nor is there much to cheer in the estate weirdo who carves the initial of his beloved neighbour Samantha (Sally Hawkins) on his chest – she doesn't even like him. As for sad old Sid (Sam Kelly) who works with Rachel at the care home, his romantic overtures are so awkward the poor girl won't shift her gaze from the lavatory bowl she's cleaning.

The mainstay of Leigh's past work, even in a film as bitter as Naked (1993), is a vigorous verbal comedy, yet this too is notably thin on the ground. One or two exchanges achieve a certain twisted poetry: "Swear on your mum's grave." "My mum ain't dead yet!" Maureen (Ruth Sheen), one of the very few likeable characters, manages to keep up an insouciant patter even in the company of her sullen teenage daughter, but this has more to do with a rare spirit of cheerfulness than wit. The poverty that hangs about the estate is also a poverty of language: it's disheartening to report that the three most common utterances in the film are "Wot?", "Shut up" and "Fuck off". Whatever aspects Leigh encouraged his actors to work on during those trademark rehearsal processes, charm was certainly not among them.

If the film isn't animated by social conscience, or romantic love, or comedy, or any distinctive patterning of language or imagery, what exactly is it about? One could call it "a slice of life", but this would be to suggest a level of documentary realism that actually isn't there; at no point do we forget that we are watching a Mike Leigh film. What emerges from this broken sequence of bleak moments (it could hardly be styled a plot) is, in the end, some extraordinarily good acting. I hope Timothy Spall never tires of getting beneath the skin of defeated loners like Phil, because he is without peer. He says nothing especially memorable, but he doesn't have to – his character registers in every gesture, in his mournfully saggy jowls and the pleading gaze that hardly dares to meet anyone else's. Manville also etches a soulful disappointment into her pinched features, and the mask of tears that becomes her face seems to survey a whole lifetime.

Indeed, Phil's anguished truth-telling is the climax of an acting masterclass between Spall and Manville, and it occupies virtually the final half-hour of the film. (The other storylines are left for dead.) The pathos of their duet, surely, is the reason why All Or Nothing might endear itself to an audience outside of the festival circuit. There are some excellent minor performances, too, and I only wish they were in the service of characters with a point of view, or a sense of purpose – anything, really, beyond the raw instinct to survive.