Classic Corner: Meantime

Mike Leigh’s favorite of all his films, Meantime originally aired in 1983 on the British television’s Channel Four and circulated for years on lo-fi bootlegs before being lovingly restored for the Criterion Collection. But such pristine presentation might not be the ideal way to see the picture, which was beamed into Thatcher-era British households like an alarming reflection of what was already happening in their living rooms. One of the director’s most jagged domestic dramas, the film follows an unemployed family struggling in London’s run-down, East End council estates, bluntly confronting the grinding boredom of life on the dole and the seething resentments it breeds. Nearly everything in the film is curdled and ugly, even the humor aggressive and sour. It’s one of the most vivid depictions of how people without purpose turn on each other.

Quadrophenia’s Phil Daniels stars as Mark Pollock, an embittered twentysomething who’s a little too smart to have any patience for the patronizing lip service being offered to people in his circumstances, though not quite smart enough to be able to tell when his acting out is counterproductive. In many ways, Mark is like a less-verbal precursor to David Thewlis’s Johnny, the unforgettable protagonist of Leigh’s Naked, splenetically opting out of a rat race where he wasn’t welcome anyway. It’s notable that he’s the only character we see venturing on his own outside the circumscribed slums of the council estates, Mark’s mid-movie walk through Trafalgar Square so jarring it’s like we’re visiting not just a different city, but a different planet. 

A similar unease occurs during the film’s indelible opening sequence, in which the Pollock family is frogmarched through the middle-class suburban home of their Aunt Barbara (regular Leigh collaborator Marion Bailey) and her bank manager husband John (an impossibly young-looking Alfred Molina). The time-honored ritual of showing off the fancy new digs — I’m particularly taken with Aunt Barbara’s laborious, tacky tea tables — is deflated by the rest of the family’s sullen indifference. The pleasantries are rushed and dutiful, time together enjoyed by nobody.

Mark tries to look out for his kid brother Colin (Tim Roth), so sullen and socially withdrawn Uncle John assumes he’s “retarded.” (Colin’s condition, like a lot of things in the film, is intentionally unexplained.) The wide-eyed, bespectacled Colin is socially maladroit under the best of circumstances, so embarrassing that his own father (Jeffrey Robert) pretends not to know him while standing in line at the unemployment office. The siblings live practically on top of each other in a tiny room, getting on each other’s last nerve almost as badly as their parents, who exchange nary a pleasant word in the entire 103 minutes.

Leigh’s movies have always been concerned more with behavior than story, and what passes for a plot in Meantime involves Aunt Barbara’s well-meaning, if totally misguided attempt to offer Colin “a job” helping her redecorate her bedroom. It’s a token gesture that sets off all sorts of frissions in the fraught family dynamic, the kind of condescending good deed that never goes unpunished. 

The director’s unique, character-first working method prioritizes the input of his actors. They start with a blank page and build the roles from scratch with improvisational exercises, after which Leigh goes off and writes the screenplay. (This is why, like a lot of his early films, Meantime is credited as “devised and directed by Mike Leigh.”) It’s similar to the way John Cassavetes worked with his actors, and should not be confused with the modern improv methods employed by the likes of Judd Apatow and Joe Swanberg, where everyone stands around making up a movie while the camera is rolling. 

Leigh and his actors have so much invested in their creations that it’s impossible for them — or the film, for that matter — to take sides. There’s a fascinating, sometimes emotionally frustrating equanimity to Meantime, in which arguments and scenes have no clear-cut heroes or villains, people are simply who they are. On the Criterion supplements, a rankled Leigh still sounds sore pointing out that the film was received poorly by leftwing commentators, who felt that he’d bungled an opportunity to make more didactic points. Of course, they went in looking for politics. He made a movie about people.

Meantime is maybe most fondly remembered for the breakthrough appearance of Gary Oldman, who swaggers into the film like a movie star waiting to happen as Coxy, a rambunctious skinhead and toxic role model for young Colin. (Roth tells a story about accidentally breaking a light bulb over Oldman’s head during rehearsal, sending his bloody co-star to the hospital in full neo-Nazi Docs and suspenders, screaming, “For fuck’s sake, tell them I’m an actor!”)  

The title denotes the limbo in which these characters reside without opportunity. The film is chillingly evocative of the entropy and wasted days spent idle, down the pub without purpose or the hope of a better life. Where does all that energy go, all that young, male pent-up aggression?  As we see in the case of Coxy — or in cases all over the internet right now — it goes nowhere good. 

“Meantime” is streaming on the Criterion Channel, and available on Blu-ray from the Criterion Collection.

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