Tuesday, February 28, 2023

Home Sweet Home (Mike Leigh, 1982)

 

Home Sweet Home is emblematic early-ish Mike Leigh, bitterly funny and appalling, inviting suspicions of condescension, but with too many flashes of desperate verisimilitude for any such charges to completely stick. A plot summary seems to align the film with randy workplace concoctions on the lines of On the Buses: postman Stan has an affair with the wife of one of his colleagues while being aggressively pursued by the wife of one of the others, things coming to a head when both women show up at his house at once. But Stan (Eric Richard) is no working-class Casanova, his appeal seeming mainly based in the contrast with the two inadequate husbands, and capable of awful self-serving coldness, as in the heartrending mini-portrait of his treatment of a woman he picks up at the launderette. His teenage daughter, Tina, has spent most of the time since her mother’s departure in foster care or group homes; Stan only reluctantly visits her, his inadequacy as a father pushing him into irritable taciturnity. It’s Tina who occupies the film’s final shot, suggesting she’s the most major casualty of the whole mess; a sly late pivot introduces a new social worker who bombards Stan with jargon while providing an ample window on his own bitter preoccupations. The title is ironic to a fault of course: as always, Leigh has an eerie capacity to create lived-in spaces and routines (how many cups of tea were offered and consumed in his work of this period?), while conveying how the frail economic predictability they provide is, as Sondheim might have put it, a daily little death. Tim Barker’s indelibly conceived Harold may be the saddest of the sad bunch, his wife snapping back at his most basic utterances, a stream of dumb jokes and disconnected utterances failing to disguise how he’s barely present in his own life, let alone anyone else’s.

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