LIFE IS SWEET Movie Review

You can read about his unique, inclusive methods for preparing a film, and then you can watch the resulting picture over and over until you're blue in the face, but when a movie by Mike Leigh succeeds on the scale of Life Is Sweet, there's simply no way to figure out how he does it. This time, his plot centers on parents Andy and Wendy (Jim Broadbent and Allison Steadman) who have twin daughters (Jane Horrocks and Claire Skinner) who are as different from each other as they are from dad and mum. The sisters are the spine of Life Is Sweet, but the totality of their relationship—and their complex problems—reveal themselves when least expected, as in life. Andy is one of this movie's two chefs; he decides that the key to his family's future security is a rolling food-cart, which is as liberating an image to him as Albert Brooks's Winnebago in Lost in America. Aubrey (Timothy Spall of Leigh's Secrets and Lies) is a friend who aims higher, opening a hopelessly pretentious pseudo-French restaurant and persuading Wendy to fill in as a waitress. The sequence contains some of the biggest laughs in any of Leigh's films, but as always in Leigh the comedy is used as a brace for the film's delicate and genuinely insightful examination of human frailty, loneliness, and need. In achieving this balance with such a miraculous combination of honesty, wit, and insight, Life Is Sweet may be Leigh's masterpiece—his most deeply affecting, magically conjured film, and the one that seems continually richer after repeated viewings.

NEXT STOP … High Hopes, Naked, Secrets and Lies

1990 (R) 103m/C GB Alison Steadman, Jane Horrocks, Jim Broadbent, Claire Skinner, Timothy Spall, Stephen Rea, David Thewlis; D: Mike Leigh; W: Mike Leigh. Los Angeles Film Critics Association Awards '91; Best Supporting Actress (Horrocks); National Society of Film Critics Awards '91: Best Actress (Steadman), Best Film, Best Supporting Actress (Horrocks). VHS, LV, Closed Caption REP, BTV