{"id":760416,"date":"2026-09-05T03:30:09","date_gmt":"2026-09-05T03:30:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/760416\/"},"modified":"2026-09-05T03:30:09","modified_gmt":"2026-09-05T03:30:09","slug":"tender-loving-care-review-mike-leighs-tale-should-have-been-fuller","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/760416\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Tender Loving Care Review: Mike Leigh’s Tale Should Have Been Fuller"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tEvery so often, the British writer-director Mike Leigh<\/a> makes a movie in which the stars \u2014 and the tartly casual dramatic scenes \u2014 line up, coalescing into a full-on vision of prickly humanity. It happened in \u201cSecrets & Lies\u201d (1996), admittedly a kind of \u201cGuess Who\u2019s Coming to Dinner\u201d for the art-house crowd, though in its neorealist-sitcom way it was a movie that fired on all cylinders. It happened in \u201cTopsy-Turvy\u201d (1999), Leigh\u2019s sublime Gilbert and Sullivan biopic \u2014 easily his greatest film, which is quite the irony given that it\u2019s the furthest he ever strayed from his working-class fixations. It happened, too, in \u201cAnother Year\u201d (2010), his scaldingly funny riff on the melancholy of middle age.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cTender Loving Care<\/a>,\u201d I\u2019m compelled to report, is not one of those Leigh movies where it all comes together for him, fusing into a drama that\u2019s greater than the sum of its parts. This one has a handful of vivid characters who are lively and touching company. The actors, as is always the case in a Mike Leigh film, inhabit their roles with uncanny everyday verve. You might say, \u201cWhat\u2019s not to like?\u201d But Watching \u201cTender Loving Care,\u201d I had the sense of wanting Leigh to go deeper into his characters \u2014 into the dreams holding their lives together, and the trauma underlying their daily grind. Leigh doesn\u2019t make any wrong moves here; just about every scene in the movie plays. Yet \u201cTender Loving Care\u201d builds (or maybe I should say recedes) to something more schematic than it is powerful.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe title sounds inviting, but what does it mean? It refers to about five different things at once, and that fuzziness is actually a bit of problem, in terms of cueing the audience to what the film is about. Amy (Kate O\u2019Flynn), the spiky-on-the-surface but really quite winsome central character, and her best friend, the more merciless but superficial Rosie (Alice Bailey Johnson), are social workers, so they\u2019ve dedicated their lives to helping people \u2014 but the tender loving care they offer is starting to fall on deaf ears. Amy has the look of a beaming nun: smiling, devotional, hair pulled back in a way that\u2019s a touch prim. We see her attempt to engage one emotionally lost teen foster child after another, but they\u2019re not engaging with her. Amy still cares, but does the system care? The background of the film is the budget slashes that are happening in this sector all over the Western world, as the government withdraws its own form of care.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cTender loving care\u201d also refers to how Amy and Rosie take care of each other. Amy has moved back into Rosie\u2019s comfy apartment after five years, during which Amy was living with a man; but now he\u2019s abandoned her and gone back to his wife in Glasgow. The two women start to hang out again like college pals, gossiping and hip-hip dancing and \u2014 always \u2013 splitting a bottle of white wine. They\u2019ve been friends for decades and care deeply about each other. But do they care, in the right way, about themselves?<\/p>\n

\n\tAmy\u2019s aging parents are presented as the Platonic ideal of caring. They\u2019re utterly conventional middle-class fuddy-duddies who have always treated Amy, their only child, with kid gloves (and they still do, even though she\u2019s 37). Marion Bailey, who plays the mum, is Leigh\u2019s real-life partner, and she creates an infectious portrait of nattering devotion. But it\u2019s Paul Jesson, as her husband (the character must be approaching 80 but looks even older), who makes the film\u2019s most starkly moving impression. He\u2019s the soul of decency, wrapped in a hard crust. He\u2019s the kind of relative you love to see on holidays, because he doesn\u2019t have much to say. But in his doddering way, he\u2019s all there. (He tells jokes.) Until he isn\u2019t. The onset of his dementia arrives slowly but surely (as these things tend to do), and Leigh is too sly a filmmaker to milk it. \u201cTender Loving Care\u201d says to its audience: Yes, this happens. And when it does, the person you know is gone, just like that. (Jesson\u2019s character starts talking about swans.) That, more than ever, is when we need care.<\/p>\n

\n\tIt\u2019s an intermittently compelling, mildly affecting, in the end slightly scattershot movie. The reason I\u2019m sounding a bit churlish about it is that it engages us without touching any hidden glimmer of mystery in its characters, any surprise perception of pain or desire. Amy and Rosie are intensely appealing women, yet their lives with men have been a washout. We think: Why? Is it because men are shits? That\u2019s the conclusion the two seem to have come to, especially after the fireman Rosie has her current hopes pinned on asks her out to a fancy dinner date, only to stand her up. But this double lonely-hearts scenario is too sodden and limiting. Even if these women aren\u2019t happy (or lucky in love), the film needed to give us a more developed feeling for what they want.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe most starkly powerful scene in the film is about motherhood. One of Amy\u2019s charges is a mess of a young mother who has had all three of her children taken away from her by the state. She\u2019s scared to talk to Amy because she thinks what she says will just be used against her. Is she right? What\u2019s Leigh\u2019s attitude here? It should have been clearer, but what comes across with utter force is the character\u2019s life-and-death passion.<\/p>\n

\n\tAmy needed a moment like that. Kate O\u2019Flynn, from the TV series \u201cWidow\u2019s Bay,\u201d is a commanding actor, but she doesn\u2019t invest Amy with the power of a destiny laid bare. And that\u2019s because Leigh isn\u2019t totally invested in her destiny; he wants to tie it all into a larger \u201csociological\u201d view. The film opens with Rosie interviewing an old demented homeless man in a hospital, and then, the morning after, he has vanished, fallen through the cracks of the system. He comes back at the end \u2014 and we can\u2019t help but notice that he looks like the man Jesson\u2019s character might have been, if he\u2019d had no one to take care of him. I guess that makes a statement. But it\u2019s an abstract statement. It tweaks our pieties rather than roiling our souls.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Every so often, the British writer-director Mike Leigh makes a movie in which the stars \u2014 and the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":760417,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[96,227538,58179,2839,44276,237060,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-760416","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-kate-oflynn","tag-mike-leigh","tag-movies","tag-telluride-film-festival","tag-tender-loving-care","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/760416","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=760416"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/760416\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/760417"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=760416"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=760416"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=760416"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}