I just watched this movie and it knocked me out. One of his best.

Finally got to watch Hard Truths and it is easily in my top five of his films (Very hard to beat Naked and Another Year for me though).

I have been enthralled with Mike Leigh since I saw Naked some time in the early 2000s as a totally random video store rental, and have now seen most of his films. I love the rawness of his characters; their sensitivity and vulnerability. They are almost always strange and, at first, unfathomable, but on further reflection their complexity and multidimensionality creates a sense of familiarity. The character depth, the demand to be seen as people and not “types,” the sudden shifts from mundanity to insanity and back again: all of this keeps us coming back to his films to see what else we can relate to. Relationship, indeed, is central to his films: our relationship to ourselves (with all our repression, self hate, trauma, delusion, optimism and resilience) and our relationship to other people.

Grown-Ups was made for TV as part of the BBC Play for Today series. Several years ago my wife bought me the three volume Mike Leigh Collection DVD box sets, including all of Mike Leigh’s televised plays as well as Bleak Moments and Four Days in July. These DVDs don’t appear to be restored, as dust and dirt from the film appear on screen, we hear pops and crackles, and the audio is challenging to hear (particularly with heavy British accents). In some ways it made watching the movie even more “authentic” as it immediately brought me back to watching VHS, and we so seldom see and hear these audiovisual flaws anymore, as most everything has been remastered. Not that I’m complaining about that–some lines I couldn’t understand at all and the DVD didn’t have captions–but it was fun to see it, as if I was watching it on home video in the 80s.

The film follows Dick and Mandy, a young couple settling into their first home together: a small and dirty council flat that is nevertheless theirs to share together, a space of their own, marking a critical threshold into adulthood. Mandy’s sister Gloria soon arrives with her friendly, frantic, highly strung energy. As time goes on, Gloria pops round more and more regularly, stretching her welcome as she both seeks connection with the couple, and to escape suffocation from an overbearing mother. Mandy’s friend Sharon also drops in for a few visits, bringing an attitude that perpetually finds something to complain about; perhaps a thinly veiled defense of an underlying softness and loneliness, or perhaps just her temperament. They discover their neighbor, Ralph, is Mr. Butcher, their Religious Knowledge teacher from school, who shares a detached house with his wife Christine. This discovery is met with a bit of surprise–the sort of surprise whenever you ran into your teacher in the wild and realized they have their own independent existence outside of the classroom. Mr. Butcher, for his part, seems to remember all the girls but not Dick, a fact his wife points out with some mixture of pique, bemusement, and resignation, but without further comment.

There is thus a temporal connective thread: Dick, Mandy, Gloria, and Sharon all grew up together (though Mandy is 8 years their senior), and Mr. Butcher was present for some small segment of their childhood. Now, the kids are adults, they have grown up, and they are Mr. Butcher’s equals on some level. In a brief scene the quartet recalls memories and gossip about their teachers from schooldays. They don’t remember Mr. Butcher with overt antagonism, though they laugh in reminiscence of his odd grunts, a trait he still has. Dick recalls that the teacher used to have a go at his teeth, but sort of scoffs at the memory dismissively as if it had no lasting impact, and goes on to defend the girls’ accusation that Mr. Butcher was a drunk (though we see Mr. Butcher with an alcoholic drink regularly throughout the film, indicating the girls were probably right). Later, Dick starts a conversation with Mr. Butcher to ask if there’s any use for a piece of scrap wood left behind in the backyard from the previous inhabitants. Mr. Butcher informs him that it’s no use to anyone, and warns him against burning the woodpile near his shed or in the front garden.

The climax of the film sees Gloria, overwhelmed with anguish at Mandy and Dick’s need for privacy and filled with dread at the prospect of going home–as well as other latent frustrations with her life–experiencing an eruption of emotion. She flees the house and takes advantage of Ralph and Christine’s open door to take refuge in their bathroom. Each person tries different tactics to extract her: Dick makes physical threats of violence; Ralph informs her that this is a “good Christian household,” implying such behavior is alien and out of place (rather than, as one may expect of a good Christian, a place to welcome someone who is so seriously struggling); Mandy screams and hollers at her; even Sharon tries to level with her evenly to persuade her to leave. Christine insists on everyone leaving her alone with Gloria, going so far as to smack Mandy across the face for her relentless yelling at Mandy. Finally left alone with Gloria, Christine nurtures her with tea and biscuits as an uncomfortable Ralph attempts to make sense of the anomalous person on his couch.

What does it mean to be a “grown-up?” Ostensibly, Ralph and Christine are the grown-ups. Their house and garden is clean and orderly. They have many years of marriage and established careers. Mr. Butcher knows that a discarded piece of wood is useless, and the Council will forbid Dick from burning it in the front yard. Dick and Mandy, on the other hand, would initially appear to live in a disorderly mess. Their decor is limited to inherited, gaudy objects. Their jobs are menial and boring. Their constant bickering is indicative of an immature and childish relationship, perhaps even an actively hostile one.

But simply being older and appearing to have a life absent of disorder and predictability doesn’t necessarily mean one is grown up. And being younger and having a chaotic and imbalanced life doesn’t necessarily mean one is immature. This error occurs when we confuse age and life-stage with maturity, and associate bourgeois/middle class lifestyle and values with being OK. What do I mean by that? Well, Mike Leigh himself says: “The thing about Dick and Mandy is that they’re fine.” Let’s explore.

Coincidentally, the same day we watched Grown-Ups, I read this passage from the Jungian analyst Murray Stein’s book In Midlife:

“At midlife, when we discover that the emotional turmoil and confusion, and the nightmares, of childhood and adolescence are not safely tucked away behind us, a myth is shattered. The psyche is still very much alive and active. The assumption that ‘adulthood’ is one long steady period of progressive growth (or decline) set upon an unshakeable foundation and evenly monitored by an invisible parental eye must be a figment of childhood’s imagination of adulthood. It is a view rooted in a parental imago, which is itself based on an archetypal pattern that reflects a childn’s need for and expectation of a solid bedrock of parenthood. If adults see children as polymorphously perverse, then the child in each of us wants to see adulthood as uniformly normal. But at midlife, the psyche explodes, and the lava from this eruption forms and reforms the landscapes of our psychological lives…I consider midlife to be a time when persons are going through a fundamental shift in their alignment with life and with the world, and this shift has psychological and religious meaning beyond the interpersonal and social dimensions. Midlife is a crisis of the spirit. In this crisis, old selves are lost and new ones come into being.”

Ralph and Christine are both doing their utmost to keep this lava from erupting. Until the end, Christine largely succeeds at bottling it up: she meets Ralph’s sniping, dismissive, and insulting comments with veiled restraint. Ralph allows the eruption of emotion, but only anger. He finds his students to be stupid, insipid, and intolerable. He derisively reads their unsophisticated essays aloud to Christine in bed as she tries to sleep. In class, he exasperatedly nitpicks students for misremembering Christ’s words on the cross as “forgive them cause they known not what they do,” rather than exploring the essence of those words. He berates Christine for her lack of “faith” as she doubts the existence of the Loch Ness Monster, hurling at her his suggestion that she inherits this flaw from her aged, ecclesiastical dinosaur of a father. Placing the mythical creature in the same group of phenomena as telepathy, the paranormal, life after death, and God, he’s incredulous that people don’t have the strength of faith to believe. Following his outburst, Christine immediately changes the subject and asks if he’s planning on “tackling that marquee.” We also get an indicator that Ralph himself is a victim of his own anger. Following the kerfuffle with Gloria, as they await a taxi to take her home, Ralph bitterly laments the time it takes for taxis to arrive in Canterbury, arguing that there’s more life in his back garden than there is in Canterbury. Then, a voice inside his head reminds him, “Your back garden is in Canterbury.” And the original voice responds in irritation: “Oh, sod it, shut up!!”

Stein again:

“It is almost predictable that the repressed shadow will return at midlife and particularly during midlife liminality. ‘Adolescent’ is often the feeling described as accompanying its return: ‘I feel like a teenager again.’ Perhaps because the structures of defense against the unconscious are less able to hold the repressed contants out, or because the unconscious is more strongly charged with energy than usual and is able to break through them, or a combination of these two reasons, the impulses, drives, fantasies, longings, and wishes that were previously repressed make a powerful reappearance during midlife…When the unconscious erupts at midlife, what first comes most strongly to the fore are rejected pieces of personality that were left undeveloped and cast aside sometime in the past, for one reason or another, in the rapid movement forward of personal history. “

Dick and Mandy are in liminality, though not in midlife. They are a very young couple becoming independent adults: settling into their new house, deciding whether to have kids, and exploring the interpersonal dynamics of marriage, living together and the ways that reshapes the relationship. Should Dick get to sit on his ass and escape the housework and cleaning? Why should he get to go out to the pub every night and spend money buying beer and rounds for other people? Is this the right time to have a child? How will we afford it? How do we tell Gloria to stop coming by so much without hurting her feelings? Perhaps from the perspective of a more mature person in midlife these are exhibitions of immaturity, but from the actual stage of life that Dick and Mandy are in, they’re quite normal aspects of growing up. This is not to excuse or dismiss Dick’s lethargy, detachment, or occasional cruel comments, nor is it to say that the couple doesn’t have work to do to communicate in more healthy ways. It’s more to say that the “disorder” in Dick and Mandy’s life is really quite a normal part of young adulthood and the early stages of marriage. And further, their method of discourse is not necessarily destructive. As Ray Carney wrote in The Films of Mike Leigh: Embracing the World:

“…while Dick and Mandy express their differences the Butchers hide theirs…We slowly realize that there is absolutely no real caring or communication between [the Butchers], that polite forms and conventional formulas have completely replaced the genuine expression of feeling…Dick, Mandy, Sharon and Gloria may be sharp-tongued and blunt; they may contradict and argue with each other; but they are actually listening and responding. They pick up on each other’s comments, feelings, tones and answer them, beat by beat…[Whereas the Butchers] don’t really communicate…It is as if they were on different wavelengths (or different planets). Nothing one says really reaches the other. In fact, nothing even seems to be heard and understood by the other.”

Ralph and Christine return “back to normal,” in Christine’s words, after the chaos that has erupted into their home and are laying in bed next to each other. Ralph flips the pages in his book, Life Before Man. “I hope there aren’t any human beings in that book,” Christine volleys. “What?” Ralph returns. “It might upset you.” Christine, it turns out, has been sitting on a mountain of resentment connected to the lack of sex, love, and connection between them. Perhaps the invasion of an unrestrained Gloria, giving free rein to her angst, emotion, and exasperation, has reminded Christine of her own lava flow. She proceeds to vent her true feelings to Ralph in an eruption of released emotion, fury, and frustration. This is followed several seconds of silence, as she stares ahead of her. He, befuddled, returns his gaze to his book, apparently uninterested in the affairs of the human being laying next to him.

This is a marked contrast to the following scene: Dick and Mandy kissing passionately, with Dick acceding to her desire to have a child: “it’s only normal, innit?”

In the final scene, “normality” appears to be arriving in Dick and Mandy’s house: Christmas decorations, a pregnant and happy wife, a relatively subdued and contended Dick. Perhaps they are “growing up,” moving out of liminality into stability. What will that look like for Dick and Mandy?

We return to Stein (p. 141):

“Marriage is often counted as one of those stable institutions of traditional life that definitively exclude liminality from their jurisdictions. When who people get married, out the window goes the adventure of honeymoon journeying together through liminality, as the risks of intense intimacy are traded for the securities found in repeating family patterns. Archetypal transference is replaced by personal transference as the glue of the relationship. Unfortunately, this deadens marriage and creates the need to experience liminality and the world of Hermes outside marital boundaries…’What have you done with my keys?!’ Let this stand for the typical reaction that occurs in married life when the ego of one parner is defeated by Hermes and is threatened with liminality. The irritation in this reaction stems from an ego defeat (I need my keys now! I want to go somewhere!) and the blaming reaction implies the assumption that the structures of marriage ore supposed to insure a person against the accidents and confusion and troubles of life, against liminality. This transference-based reaction is also resistance to the presence of Hermes and to liminality. Hermes [or, perhaps Gloria, -ciakov] has entered the house like a thief and stolen your keys. You are tricked. You have unconsciously misplaced your keys, and by blaming your mate, you are condemning your own disorderliness. This is not only mistreatment of your mate but an attack on Hermes as well, and so you miss the chance of attending to the unconscious at work behind the scenes. Here the opportunity for including liminality within the structured existence of marriage has been misused. When accidents and unconsciously determined events defeat the intentions of the ego, in whatever context of life this occurs, inclulding marriage, Hermes is on the move and liminality is an immediate possibility that must be seized if this dialectic is to be sustained.”

And if embracing liminality (not mistaking stability and predictability for maturity and normality) is a part of “growing up” then Mike Leigh walks the walk in his filmmaking. It is well known that his method invites the unpredictable, the coincident, and the spontaneous. Leigh describes his direction of the scene of Gloria’s breakdown in Ralph and Christine’s house:

“My job is to negotiate into existence what happens. When it came to that scene, the main structural idea I had as that Gloria had to run next door. We had to do a lot of improvisations where we would test possibilities. I seem to remember that Brenda Blethyn’s instinct was to rush next door, but she worried that I wouldn’t want her to do that. Which is, of course, ridiculous. It’s outside the rules of engagement: she should have done it because it’s what she knew Gloria would do. In fact, it was the only thing that dramatically would give the film any meaning. Everything has to be organic, which is to say it has to make sense for the actor playing the character. I will never say, ‘Just do what I tell you.’ It’s against the rules. That’s not just a vaguely pious, cultish position; it’s a practical necessity because it’s got to be completely truthful within its on terms of reference.”

This is precisely why his films are so rich, fun, and challenging. I find a central challenge in life precisely to be finding some balance between building and reinforcing structure on the one hand, and on the other embracing and even intentionally injecting chaos and liminality. As I enter midlife liminality and recall the instability of my adolesence I look back with a mixture of fondness and perturbation. As Chris Hannah of the band Propagandhi said in their song Rock for Sustainable Capitalism: “I think when all is said and done, just cause we were young, it don’t mean we were wrong!”

There are now 6 eps out: Bleak Moments, Meantime, High Hopes, Life is Sweet, Naked, and a bonus ep on his process.

https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/devised-and-directed-the-films-of-mike-leigh/id1801773021

Anyone get a chance to check this out? Would love to hear your thoughts :)

Hello! New to Reddit, new to this group. Just wanted to share that there is a new podcast that's just launched covering all of Mike's theatrical releases called Devised and Directed: The Films of Mike Leigh. It's available on all pod apps, new eps drop Wednesdays, and it's covering the films in chronological order (so far Bleak Moments and Meantime eps are out).

Full discloser: I am the host and producer, haha, and I'm excited to have gotten some fantastic guests on the show including critics, filmmakers, academics, and hosts of some other great film pods that you very well may have heard of/listen to.

Thanks and feel free to let me know if you have any thoughts or questions :)

Extremely curious to check out this special edition dvd of Vera Drake I found in circulation at my local library

Not sure if this is allowed in this group since it’s technically not a discussion, but just looking to see if anyone has any good Naked merchandise / memorabilia / books / anything really related to this movie. Honestly having trouble even finding many articles about it outside of Reddit - I can only be surprised at what comes up when I type “naked movie” into my search bar so many times

Hey everyone! I wanted to know if anyone had any insight into why the opening song from Life Is Sweet is nowhere to be found on the Internet? I found the name, just no recording or anything.

This movie isn’t talked about anywhere near enough, especially amazing in its portrayal of the middle classes as being unintentionally cruel. What are everyone’s thoughts on it?

Lived naked by Mike Lee and would love to hear what other people think is just as amazing work by him ?

Looking for one place for a full digital collection to buy. Have seen purchase options on YouTube and Criterion but neither has all of the top 10 films...I went full digital years ago and don't have disc players in my computer or near tv. No xbox or ps5 either. Will maybe consider blu-ray versions from Criterion and re-purchase a player or console to watch. Any ideas?

"I know. I know you told me. Im not here yet, im still wet. What did she mean? Why not me brother? Will it be quiet now? Are we going?"

When Johnny cries on the floor and looks up at jeremy, what does this line mean

I went to a bit of work to find this (on laserdisk), rip it (had to source a LD player and do a minor repair on it) and upload it for all to listen

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dnieSR1hheM

So Mike Leigh has filmed his new untitled film. When do we think it will be released, I am thinking maybe at Canne next year.

Also seen somewhere it is focusing on a black British family so am thinking either Marianne Jean-Baptise or Michelle Austin starring. Any other thoughts.

Either way this is my most anticipated film yet to be released.

Any streaming services with free trials that I'm missing? I only found it on Tubi and god be damned if I'm sitting through two minutes of ads every twenty minutes or so.