Secrets and Lies
with Brenda Blethyn, Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Timothy Spall, Claire Rushbrook, Phyllis Logan
Written and Directed by Mike Leigh
by William Ham
It isn’t until you see a film like Secrets and Lies that you realize how consistently movies have cheated and scammed us. The movie screen is one of the most expansive canvasses an artist can hope to work on, and yet, we keep allowing the brushes to fall into the hands of condescending hacks. In contemporary cinema, humanity is a cheap plot device, emotions are manipulated with the cold mechanics of the worst pornography, and dumb one-liners and high-tech explosions are considered expressive. We’ve been snowed by armies of P.T. Barnums with moviolas, and still we come back, again and again, using the lame excuse of “escapism” to justify wasting $7.50 on heartless technology-fests and third-rate copies of Tarantino’s copies of Scorsese and Woo.
Thank God, then, for Mike Leigh. His films (with the possible exception of 1993’s pessimistic Naked) are celebrations of life in all its flawed, mundane glory, of the beautiful imperfections of the human heart and our conflicted courses through the crooked straits of the everyday. His protagonists are usually simple, workaday people, but his forthrightness and refusal to reduce even the most minor of them to caricature reveals their nobility. Secrets and Lies, the deserved winner of the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes film festival, is a heart-wrenchingly funny and painfully uplifting glimpse into the private dysfunctions of an English working-class family that needs to be turned upside-down to right itself.
The agent of change in this tale is Hortense (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), a prosperous young optometrist who, after the death of her adoptive mother, sets out to track down the woman who gave her up at birth. Naturally, complications ensue, not the least of which is the fact that Hortense is black and her birth mother, Cynthia (Brenda Blethyn, Best Actress at Cannes), is white. Cynthia’s life is entangled enough; she’s a single mum with a dead-end factory job, a daughter, Roxanne (Claire Rushbrook), with “a face like a slapped arse” and nothing to say to her, and a brother, Maurice (Timothy Spall), a successful photographer whose moody upper-class wife, Monica (Phyllis Logan), has kept the two of them apart for years. Cynthia at first refuses to believe that Hortense is hers, but quickly warms to the idea – at last, here is someone who wants to receive the love she has been so thwarted in giving. Maurice, himself pained by the silence between siblings, decides to hold a 21st-birthday barbecue for Roxanne at the house neither she nor Cynthia had ever seen. Cynthia convinces Hortense to join her, passing her off as a “mate from work,” and the stage is set for a very interesting afternoon…
It may sound like a cross between a soap opera and a stage farce, and on a superficial level it is, but Leigh and his cast never allow the story to dissolve into melodramatic bathos. All are wonderful, but several stand out. Jean-Baptiste exudes confidence and strength as Hortense – her luminous smile is like a shaft of light into the darkness of the others’ lives. Spall, best known for his wacky turn as the would-be restauranteur in Leigh’s Life Is Sweet, shows a surprisingly moving side here; his gentle manner and pained eyes register the toll of a man stuck in the middle of a three-way war of silence. And Blethyn simply puts all of the overpaid actresses in Hollywood to shame. She spends much of the film either in tears or on the verge of them, but Cynthia is far from grating or unintentionally comic. Even her smallest moments in the film – the way she explains her greater attraction for Brando over Stallone, her attempt to reach out to Roxanne through contraceptives, or the heartbreaking way she calls everyone “sweetheart” and “darling” – suggests an emotional spectrum that a year’s worth of “heartwarming” dramas couldn’t hope to approach. In fact, Secrets and Lies is filled to bursting with just such small moments, the sort of tiny epiphanies that smack of real life (and thus elude Hollywood’s cipher factory). To sum up in the worst possible way: it’s no lie and I hope it doesn’t stay a secret, this is easily one of the best films of the year.
