HIGH HOPES Movie Review

The seven principal characters in Mike Leigh's ironically titled High Hopes are sharply drawn and indelible, and though they all represent different dead ends of Margaret Thatcher's England, they don't symbolize political positions to the point of simply being labels. One aging mother and three couples—one poor but sane, one maniacally desperate to climb socially, one yuppified beyond human recognition—interact over the course of a few days in a series of plot twists that is both excruciatingly witty and inevitable. We learn an enormous amount about these people as individuals, and we also come away with a surprisingly solid take on the society that created them and then dropped them right in their little traps. It's a poignant and profound little film about class distinctions, yes, but it's also a brilliant, devastatingly funny comedy about human ambition and a society that creates enemies naturally, simply as a cruel but everyday by-product of what it deems to be “progress.” Philip Davis, Ruth Sheen, Philip Jackson, and Heather Tobias are marvelous, while Lesley Manville and Edna Doré are better than that. Leigh (Secrets and Lies, Naked) employs an innovative method of preparation that involves cast members working out their own characters prior to the final script stage. It has never served him better. A classic.

NEXT STOP … Life Is Sweet, Career Girls, A Sense of History (a short film available in a package called Two Mikes Don't Make a Wright)

1988 110m/C GB Philip Davis, Ruth Sheen, Edna Dore, Philip Jackson, Heather Tobias, Leslie Manville, David Bamber; D: Mike Leigh; W: Mike Leigh; C: Roger Pratt; M: Rachel Portman, Andrew Dixon. VHS