There is not here as rich and as varied (nor as incongruous) a cast of characters as in the same filmmaker's High Hopes, limited as it mostly is to one working-class family of four ("I won't tell you again about using my cotton-wool balls!") and a few friends. But once you adjust to the idea that this is to be a sort of Reduced Hopes, there is a lot to admire and enjoy. For starters, the cast, a completely different ensemble from the previous group, no less thoroughly tuned and rehearsed. Jane Horrocks, who made such a good impression as the mousy one in Getting It Right, bids fair to steal the show as the family's squeaky wheel, a resolute naysayer (in a croaking, parakeety falsetto) and a closet junk-food binger, who's too busy thinking radical thoughts, or preparing to think radical thoughts, ever to venture out of the house and actually act on them. It's a testament to the collective strength of Alison Steadman and Jim Broadbent as her tolerant parents, and Claire Skinner as her well-behaved twin sister, that Horrocks quite fails to steal it. Theirs (and their writer-director's) is a tricky balancing act: extreme and often grotesque caricature in service to serious and compassionate and humanistic comedy (so serious and compassionate as to banish comedy altogether in a withering mother-daughter thrash-out near the finish). And if the movie had done nothing else, it would have made a major contribution, both to comedy and to linguistics, by anthologizing the shades and varieties of laughter as tools of subarticulate comment and conversation. Alison Steadman, the director's (Mike Leigh's) wife, is the virtuoso there. (1991) — Duncan Shepherd
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