Mike Leigh's my kind of filmmaker. This is a man who just loves people, especially the ones who have a lot of emotional baggage. But what separates the artists from the hacks - from stuff like Secrets & Lies from a soap, and the characters here could easily be that - is taste and talent. Leigh has good taste and he knows how to steer the ship when it comes to getting a group of actors together and getting them to reveal things through the characters. The love for these people comes through in the filmmaking, in the time given for things like a few good shots that lasts for minutes (not to where it becomes obvious, but that there's no *need* for a cut), and the deep range of the human experience: compassion, envy, spite, forgiveness, love, hate (though how much these two last is hard to say), and understanding are among those in the film.
It even could've been something close to a sappy/saccharine Guess Who's Coming to Dinner scenario, given that it's essentially about a black woman who discovers her biological mother is white. We never see the father - no need to, it was one of those bad moments in teenage years that isn't easily forgotten, but it's been put into a corner of memory for Brenda Blethyn's Cynthia at this point in her life in this story. But race isn't at all a big issue, and that's one of the first strong things to know about this film - at the same time, the filmmaker is aware of what he's putting out there, and hopes (or maybe knows) the audience will not only buy it, they'll look to what is much deeper: the pain of loss of that mother/daughter connection, but all of that other history each character has. What I mean to say is that race is not unacknowledged here, but it's not the primary focus.
What you get in Secrets & Lies is the story of people at work in their relationships and their everyday lives. The people in this film are relatively working class - perhaps doing a little better than not are Hortense, Marianne Jean-Baptiste, is an Optometrist, and Maurice, Timothy Spall, the brother of Cynthia, runs a photography studio - but we see that they have the work that they do and the people they're close to. That's it, and that's what counts for Leigh. But of course the title itself is not to be taken lightly; the structure is kind of built upon it, of what secrets/lies will be revealed through the due course of the film, even those I didn't think really that deeply about. And yet, as a great dramatist, it's right there in front of me, in the subtext of Leigh's scenario and in what the characters say as much as the up-front stuff (Maurice's marriage for example).
There's time taken to set up the characters, and I loved that about the film as well. A soap might just dive right into the 'Who is your birth mother' plot-line, or maybe after so much uninteresting time setting up people, to the point of who cares. But we know who they are with just their behavior - Cynthia's fragile form, her daughter's 'Leave me alone mum!' manner, and of course Maurice, who as a photographer has to try to make people happy. Some of those montages, by the way, are simply delightful, full of the kind of empathy that can be seen from a filmmaker in just flashes: even as they're just sketches of people, they feel fully realized, albeit once or twice as jokes. So that when Maurice does this, and then goes home to his wife and the OK-but-tense relationship there, we know where his head may be at. Also interesting is the fact that we aren't shown that Maurice and Cynthia are brothers right away - why are their stories connected, if at all - until he comes over to her house and that itself is a tremendous scene.
This is the sort of cinematic experience that had me on the edge of my seat merely by the emotional stakes of those involved. How the family may or may not find out isn't as crucial as how it will affect them, how we might (or just will) be affected by them. Blethyn may be shedding a lot of tears here, but she's playing a damaged, depressed person, and it never comes into question why she acts the way she does, and Leigh, as with his other films (especially the even more uncomfortable-in-a-good-way Naked) never judges. Other characters may do that to others, especially as things rile high to the surface, but he won't. You want to know what happens to these people once the film ends, and Leigh leaves you wanting more, genuinely so, not in any cheap way.
It even could've been something close to a sappy/saccharine Guess Who's Coming to Dinner scenario, given that it's essentially about a black woman who discovers her biological mother is white. We never see the father - no need to, it was one of those bad moments in teenage years that isn't easily forgotten, but it's been put into a corner of memory for Brenda Blethyn's Cynthia at this point in her life in this story. But race isn't at all a big issue, and that's one of the first strong things to know about this film - at the same time, the filmmaker is aware of what he's putting out there, and hopes (or maybe knows) the audience will not only buy it, they'll look to what is much deeper: the pain of loss of that mother/daughter connection, but all of that other history each character has. What I mean to say is that race is not unacknowledged here, but it's not the primary focus.
What you get in Secrets & Lies is the story of people at work in their relationships and their everyday lives. The people in this film are relatively working class - perhaps doing a little better than not are Hortense, Marianne Jean-Baptiste, is an Optometrist, and Maurice, Timothy Spall, the brother of Cynthia, runs a photography studio - but we see that they have the work that they do and the people they're close to. That's it, and that's what counts for Leigh. But of course the title itself is not to be taken lightly; the structure is kind of built upon it, of what secrets/lies will be revealed through the due course of the film, even those I didn't think really that deeply about. And yet, as a great dramatist, it's right there in front of me, in the subtext of Leigh's scenario and in what the characters say as much as the up-front stuff (Maurice's marriage for example).
There's time taken to set up the characters, and I loved that about the film as well. A soap might just dive right into the 'Who is your birth mother' plot-line, or maybe after so much uninteresting time setting up people, to the point of who cares. But we know who they are with just their behavior - Cynthia's fragile form, her daughter's 'Leave me alone mum!' manner, and of course Maurice, who as a photographer has to try to make people happy. Some of those montages, by the way, are simply delightful, full of the kind of empathy that can be seen from a filmmaker in just flashes: even as they're just sketches of people, they feel fully realized, albeit once or twice as jokes. So that when Maurice does this, and then goes home to his wife and the OK-but-tense relationship there, we know where his head may be at. Also interesting is the fact that we aren't shown that Maurice and Cynthia are brothers right away - why are their stories connected, if at all - until he comes over to her house and that itself is a tremendous scene.
This is the sort of cinematic experience that had me on the edge of my seat merely by the emotional stakes of those involved. How the family may or may not find out isn't as crucial as how it will affect them, how we might (or just will) be affected by them. Blethyn may be shedding a lot of tears here, but she's playing a damaged, depressed person, and it never comes into question why she acts the way she does, and Leigh, as with his other films (especially the even more uncomfortable-in-a-good-way Naked) never judges. Other characters may do that to others, especially as things rile high to the surface, but he won't. You want to know what happens to these people once the film ends, and Leigh leaves you wanting more, genuinely so, not in any cheap way.