Satire with a soft spot. Which, normally, is something about as useful as a Spalding baseball with a soft spot, something to be pitched into the trash can before the entire hide peels off. But High Hopes is nothing at all normal, and it would be foolish to let an axiom stand in the way of a good time. The soft spot, so-called, is a working-class couple in "Mrs. Thatcher's England" (no longer just England, much less the Queen's England), whom we straightaway intuit as matching the political sympathies of the director, Mike Leigh. Satirical "hardball," meanwhile, is played with another couple of couples: one of them a pair of privileged and plump Upper Crusties ("I thank God every day I've been blessed with such beautiful skin," proclaims the woman with cucumber slices on her eyes) and the other a pair of vulgar upstarts from the middle class. The character assigned as the conjunction in this cultural compound is an old woman who herself is too totteringly near the grave to be able to assert herself as much of any sort of character: her son is the male half of the working-class couple, her daughter is the female half of the middle-class couple, and her lifelong townhome in a neighborhood that has only lately become fashionable is right next door to the Upper Crusties. If the pieces of the movie do not finally hang together -- if cruel and corrosive ones give way graciously to sweet and tender ones -- any number of the pieces individually are nevertheless more precious than what most movies put up in the way of sum-totals. Or to put it another way: if the characters sometimes seem to belong to two separate movies, both those movies appear to be good ones. The seven principal actors, all of whom will be unfamiliar to American audiences, are uniformly (and yet so differently) marvelous: the more marvelous because unfamiliar. (Where've they been keeping themselves?) The sets and costumes have a lot to say about the characters, too, and they say it a mile a minute. Philip Davis, Ruth Sheen, Edna Doré, Leslie Manville. (1989) — Duncan Shepherd
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