Mike Leigh may be Britain's leading poet of cinematic miserabilism, but he always has enough ironic detachment from his awkward and socially inept characters to see the comedy underlying their little tragedies.
Set on a rundown South London housing estate, his latest exercise in feelbad follows exhausted minicab driver Phil (Spall) and his wife Penny (Manville), who works in a supermarket.
The film charts the couple's attempts to try and make ends meet, raise their overweight kids, and find some sort of meaning to the drudgery of their everyday lives.
Exuding the sweaty despair of a man whose existence has become one crushing defeat, Phil's awareness of "the fickle finger of whatsit... fate" weighs down heavily upon him: "We're all born alone. We die alone. There's nothing we can do about it," he gloomily reflects.
Played to the hilt by Spall (the scene in which he quietly ransacks the house for small change to pay off his minicab hire bills is a masterpiece of seat-squirming embarrassment), Phil is one of Leigh's most brilliantly observed characters.
Anchored by this excruciatingly accurate central performance, "All or Nothing" is a heartbreaking, yet curiously uplifting, film.
With fantastic supporting turns from the wide-ranging cast, and some of the most hilariously obscene bad language you're ever likely to hear in the cinema, this is terrific filmmaking - and one of Leigh's best movies since "Naked".
Resisting the temptation to slip into outright caricature and mockery, Leigh combines misery with warmth, the tragic with the funny, and the sad with the joyous.
Few directors could pull off such a tricky balancing act, but Leigh succeeds in delivering a dramatic slap in the face that's simultaneously painful and refreshing.
All or Nothing (2002)
