Read an Excerpt
Mike Leigh
By Sean O'Sullivan
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
Copyright © 2011 Sean Lawrence O'Sullivan
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-252-07819-4
Chapter One
The Nature of Contrivance
It is time to reclaim Mike Leigh from the kindly ghetto in which he has been placed by his well-meaning enthusiasts. I intend to reclaim him, over the course of this book, as a practicing theorist—a filmmaker deeply invested in cinema's formal, conceptual, and narrative dimensions. Leigh is typically considered an unassuming crafter of little movies, an English social realist who has called himself "a Third World filmmaker from this obscure island off the French coast" (Movshovitz 57) and who has written little or nothing that we would consider theory, or even criticism. I would argue that the recurrent simplifications of what Leigh's cinema is, and what Leigh's cinema does, result in part from the mode in which he works, or the mode in which he is said to work: realism. When his films are praised, it is because they are "authentic," whatever that means; when his films are attacked, it is because they fail to live up to some restrictive code of realism, a code to which he has never really claimed to subscribe. According to received wisdom, realists don't theorize; realists merely reflect. This is an absurd provincialism, and yet it remains the coin of the realm.
Films are composed of two elements: images and sounds. But Mike Leigh's images and sounds are rarely discussed. In the ancient conversation about form and content, content appears to be the only thing that matters in Leigh's cinema. The only formal aspect that does get attention is Leigh's famously unusual collaborative process, whereby the director and his actors create the characters and narrative from scratch over many months of improvisation. Just as the formal approach that distinguished the preparation of Alfred Hitchcock's movies—his elaborate storyboards—has served to draw attention to Hitchcock's interest in composition and editing, so has the prehistory of Leigh's films conditioned their reception. Unlike Hitchcock's case, however, where the story of storyboarding makes form more prominent, the story of Leigh's improvisatory approach has valorized content to the exclusion of form, celebrating the putative ideology of this system and diverting attention from Leigh's films as independent art objects. This phenomenon applies not only to images and sounds but to the third defining element of narrative cinema, storytelling structure, or what is often subdivided into character and plot. Instead of hearing about character and plot, we hear about people and events. As the story goes, Mike Leigh is not a craftsman, not a hewer of shapes and ideas, but a "wizard" whose films have "the feel of life" and celebrate "a sense of the real"; the "substance" of his films "is not to be found at the surface of events or in the way in which he handles form, but in the lives of his people, as people" (Jones xi, Carney and Quart 239, Watson iii, Clements, Improvised, 69). Whatever Leigh's purchase on verisimilitude, our discussion of that purchase remains in thrall to the question of cause (the film behind the film) at the expense of the question of effect (the film as we see and hear it). If someone who had never heard of Leigh sat down to watch one of his films, he or she would have no idea, based on the images and sounds that were produced, that the film had been made through idiosyncratic means. We need to separate the romance from the result. It is time that we stopped thinking of Mike Leigh as a shaman and started thinking of him as a filmmaker.
We can draw a parallel from the field of art history, where so-called realists are also often misunderstood. Michael Fried has worked to recover the French painter Gustave Courbet as a complex and subtle practicing theorist of art, against the Courbet public, which has portrayed him as a mechanic holding the mirror up to nature. As Fried argues: "Commentaries on Courbet's art, as on that of other realist painters (Thomas Eakins, for example), have often focused on questions of subject matter, either narrowly or broadly construed. And it has also meant that discussion has tended to proceed on the unexamined assumption that a realist painting's representation of a given scene was to all intents and purposes determined by the 'actual' scene itself, with the result that features of the representation that ought to have been perceived as curious or problematic, as calling for reflection and analysis, have either been made invisible (the usual outcome) or, if registered at all, have been attributed to reality rather than to art" (Fried 3). These assertions about the constructedness of realist enterprises hold true for any art form or discipline, but they still need to be argued, not only in the case of Gustave Courbet but in the case of Mike Leigh. The "curious or problematic," the choices that call "for reflection and analysis," have been elided, or noted only as flaws in the imitation of the real.
When I asked Leigh about his cinema, and about perhaps the most famous single image in his oeuvre, the shot of two women in a café in Secrets and Lies (1996), a daughter and mother at the moment of awkward reunion, here is what he said: "They are not naturalistic literal quasi-documentary films—they are very heightened. That café scene has as much to do with Beckett and Hopper, has more to do with Beckett and Hopper, than it has to do with a literal investigation into two women around Covent Garden on a Saturday night in the summer of 1995."
To people familiar with Leigh's early work in the theater, or with his first generation of films, the name of Beckett will not be surprising, given Leigh's often minimalist plots and the recurrent sensibility of loss and disconnection. Surely Samuel Beckett is no one's idea of a diaphanous realist, eschewing artifice and tapping straightforwardly into a "sense of the real" or "the feel of life." Likewise, one can hardly look at Edward Hopper's "Nighthawks" or "Morning Sun"—to say nothing of a nearly abstract canvas like "Rooms by the Sea"—and claim that the world we see in his paintings has not been altered in some way: framed, tinted, angled, shifted, accented to shape a version of reality. The artifice of that shot from Secrets and Lies goes beyond matters of visual composition; in fact, the shot troubles the "reality" of its supposed verisimilitude. As Leigh added: "That wide shot in the café in itself is a massive contrivance, because anybody's who's been to London will know perfectly well that if you walk down that way toward Covent Garden, you wouldn't find a café as empty as that. So, that in itself was a complete contrivance." "Contrivance" is a key term for Leigh, one critical not only for art in general but for his art in particular.
Of course, Beckett and Hopper do share an interest in the bric-a-brac of the everyday, and they brood over the ephemeral, and that certainly accounts in part for Leigh's interest in them. I should make clear that, with all my emphasis on form and contrivance and design, I am not trying to make a pitch for Mike Leigh as an exponent of the rococo or even baroque. He is not Tim Burton or Baz Luhrmann. There are compelling reasons to dip into the language of realism when considering his films. To a large degree, this is because the characters and subjects of his drama are those often associated with a realist perspective: the unemployed, the class-bound, the adrift—all the individuals and stories forgotten by the bogeyman of Hollywood. And Leigh has always insisted that the instruments of cinema—camera, mise-en-scène, music—should be motivated by the dramatic environments that they are representing. My quarrel is not with the rhetoric of realism as such; indeed, it is exactly Leigh's rhetoric of realism that I mean to address. We need to move away from the notion that Leigh's style is, in Ray Carney's words, "unrhetorical in the extreme" (Carney and Quart 241).
Leigh's enthusiasts like to discuss the back story. And certainly Leigh's process is remarkable. His method begins by gathering actors and embarking on several months of what is sometimes called rehearsal, or what Leigh prefers to call "preparatory work." He works with each actor individually, asking her or him to draw on a list of up to one hundred people that the actor has met as possible sources for the character that will be created—a list from which Leigh will select a final roster of candidates. Gradually, a history of that character is explored and created through research and improvisation, and Leigh brings different embryonic characters into contact with one another. Paul Clements has helpfully outlined Leigh's five central rules:
1. All action is the result of the characters' motivations.
2. In order for motivation to exist, the characters' individual and collective reality must be credible.
3. Each improvisation, as a real event for the characters, grows organically out of what has gone before.
4. The actors must not know the motivations of other actors' characters.
5. The improvisations are discussed always in terms of real events and never as "scenes." (Clements, Improvised, 37-38)
The balance between realism and artifice is remarkable. On the one hand, actors immerse themselves in their roles as almost nowhere else in the film or theater. If a character has a specific trade or profession, such as Natalie the plumber in Life Is Sweet (1990), the actor playing that character, in this case Claire Skinner, takes the time to learn and practice that trade or profession. The actors are ignorant of the background, plot developments, and often even the existence of other characters—as illustrated by the fact that the central surprises of Secrets and Lies and Vera Drake (2004) were revealed, to the shock of many of the actors involved, in the process of creating the story of each film. When socializing during the preparatory process, actors are strictly forbidden from discussing their work or their characters with each other. So on this side of the equation, the likeness to the real world is crucial—we don't know what's happening outside of ourselves, we don't know why other people do things, and we have no idea how the script of our lives will develop. On the other side of the equation, actors treat their characters as characters; Leigh insists that they come out of character so that they can look at what has happened objectively. When he is shooting, Leigh gives his cast a final instruction to "warm up," and they go into character for a short time before the camera rolls. This ability to move in and out of character signals an approach halfway between the precise line reading of traditional British training in Shakespeare and the complete immersion of the American strain of Method acting. And Leigh operates throughout as Daedalus in the workshop, constructing the object, moving characters and potential plots into collision with each other, deciding who gets to live and die and how things begin and end. For all the illusion of democracy, or even anarchy, that commonly attaches itself to discussion of Leigh's films, in many ways they are as despotically made as anything by Alfred Hitchcock or Stanley Kubrick.
Again, the tension between the endless possibilities of life and the circumscribed direction of art is manifest in every page of Leigh's skeletal shooting scripts. The denouement of Naked (1993) involves a number of major developments of character and plot, an extended confrontation that unfolds over twenty-one minutes of screen time. The final shooting script describes those twenty-one minutes in only eight words: "Sandra's Flat (Day Int/Ext Friday)—Enter Sandra." As Leigh has done on several films, he stopped shooting at that point in production, sent the crew home for over a week, and worked out with the actors exactly how the film would conclude. When the crew returned, there were still no words on the page. But Leigh and the cast had painstakingly determined not only what would happen but what the dialogue and blocking would be. There is virtually no on-camera improvisation on a Leigh set, in contrast with the vast majority of films, in or out of Hollywood, where multiple takes not only serve camera and sound but allow actors to play with their lines. In a Mike Leigh film, the characters, and what they say and do, are laminated before they are recorded. This volatile mixture of uncertainty and precision in the making of his films is often central to what the films explore. And the volatile mixture of uncertainty and precision in the finished films is of far greater import than the volatile mixture of uncertainty and precision in the making of the films, because if all these fascinating eccentricities simply produced "a load of rubbish" (to use Leigh's own phrase), then what importance would the gestation have? The process matters only in terms of the results. For example, until Happy-Go-Lucky (2008), there were almost no small children in his films, beyond a few extras used for context or scene-setting. This is due in part to the nature and demands of the process, since young people do not have the professional training, breadth of experience, or logistical capacity to devote to the round-the-clock preparatory months that Leigh requires. But the procedural aspect of this is of little final interest; what is of interest is the way in which the absence of small children acts as a flashpoint for innumerable issues of character, plot, image, and sound, as a central catalyst for the ideas, questions, and problems of Leigh's finished movies.
There are two dominant critical camps, in regard to his cinema. The first and most influential camp is the exceptionalists. Their perspective accentuates the distinctiveness of Leigh's creative process and the consequent purity or authenticity of his finished works. This narrative of slow, careful nurturing makes for a happy story in times anxious about multinational globalization; Leigh stands for the organic in a world of genetically modified filmmaking. This has contributed to critics' emphasis on the "reality" of his work; responses to his films are often festooned with such words as "true" and "honest," as if the films were simplifying devices rather than meticulously judged constructs. In this view, other films announce, "Somebody made this." By contrast, Leigh's films announce, "This was not made. This is." Exceptionalists have celebrated Leigh as a facilitator of "this is," linking the collectivist parable of the films' conception with the relative plotlessness of the films' stories to carve a utopian image of what movies should be—pure, honest, the whole laundry list of virginity. Leigh's films, by this reckoning, offer a kind of realism and authenticity (codes for art that cares about content and not form) that is supposedly lacking from recent cinema. Here is Stephen Holden of the New York Times on Vera Drake (2004): "The purest ensemble movie of the season is the British director Mike Leigh's gloomy period piece.... The list of perfectly calibrated supporting performances would include a dozen names" (emphases added; Holden E1). "Pure" and "perfect," words usually reserved to describe mountain spring water, are used to separate Leigh from his maculate peers.
A second camp is the generalists. The generalists wish to associate Leigh with a tradition of British cinema that often goes by the name of social realism, which traces its roots to the documentary movements of the 1930s, the Free Cinema of the 1950s, and the New Wave of the 1960s and whose most prominent contemporary practitioner would be Ken Loach. Generalists choose to define Leigh by his cinematic nationality; and, even more narrowly, that nationality is defined by its fondness for an agenda of reform, one that indicts the English class system, often by caricaturing the well-to-do or petty capitalists in favor of the noble working class—especially in the wake of the cataclysmic revolution personified by Margaret Thatcher. Generalists insist on finding an agenda in all his films, and they are often offended by it. Providing an example is Holden's New York Times colleague Manohla Dargis, in her own review of Vera Drake. Dargis praises the film by juxtaposing it with recent work like Secrets and Lies and Career Girls (1997), which apparently failed because Leigh, "like his filmmaking compatriot Ken Loach ... sometimes betrays his art for some political finger-wagging. That the two filmmakers are, of course, often just preaching to the adoring, approving choir makes such grandstanding especially tedious" (Dargis, "When a Motherly," E1). Leaving aside the idea that politics is a betrayal of art, Secrets and Lies and Career Girls are freer of overt politics than virtually any British film of the last two decades and would be among the last candidates for preachiness to be found in Leigh's oeuvre. Indeed, Vera Drake—with its focus on abortion—might more closely approximate finger-wagging than any of the films on Dargis's list. So fixed are the categories through which Leigh is judged that actual distinctions between films no longer matter. Mike Leigh has become the sum of our perceptions of him.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Mike Leigh by Sean O'Sullivan Copyright © 2011 by Sean Lawrence O'Sullivan. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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