Mark Herman's transplant to the screen, minus the first five words of the original title (The Rise and Fall of...), of Jim Cartwright's London stage piece, conceived as a showcase for the unsuspected talents of Jane Horrocks. Some of her abundant talents had of course been well known, from Mike Leigh's Life Is Sweet and elsewhere. But her talents as a mimic of the vocal styles of Judy Garland, Marilyn Monroe, Billie Holiday, Shirley Bassey, Marlene Dietrich, et al., had been hidden under a bushel. And the character fabricated by Cartwright, an agoraphobe almost mute in her shyness, but capable in the privacy of her own room to parrot back the treasured LPs of her late father, matches the real-life actress as exactly -- as uncannily -- as a doppelgänger. Some of the magic of the stage production must be lost on the screen, where suspicions of recording-studio trickery -- retakes and amplification if not out-and-out dubbing -- are difficult to quell. (Literal magic -- prestidigitation -- is for similar reasons nullified on screen.) But because she had done it on stage in front of crowds of witnesses, it is safe to assume that the voices are all hers; it is safe to marvel. And the screen has the advantage of closeups to exploit the schizophrenic disparity between this Plain Jane and her over-the-rainbow inner life. And her transformative moment in the public spotlight won't let you down. Till then, the movie really is dominated (in minutes and in words-per) by Brenda Blethyn, another, more seasoned Mike Leigh veteran, as the motor-mouthed man-hungry mother of the protagonist. Any repetition here of her performances in Secrets and Lies and Grown-Ups only adds to our impression of her as a force of nature: Tropical Storm Brenda. Quite apart from the acting, the plot mechanics of fairy-tale romance, ogre-ish cruelty, and climactic conflagration are throttlingly conventional. Michael Caine, Jim Broadbent, Ewan McGregor. (1998) — Duncan Shepherd
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