Every so often, the British writer-director Mike Leigh makes a movie in which the stars — and the tartly casual dramatic scenes — line up, coalescing into a full-on vision of prickly humanity. It happened in “Secrets & Lies” (1996), admittedly a kind of “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” for the art-house crowd, though in its neorealist-sitcom way it was a movie that fired on all cylinders. It happened in “Topsy-Turvy” (1999), Leigh’s sublime Gilbert and Sullivan biopic — easily his greatest film, which is quite the irony given that it’s the furthest he ever strayed from his working-class fixations. It happened, too, in “Another Year” (2010), his scaldingly funny riff on the melancholy of middle age.
“Tender Loving Care,” I’m compelled to report, is not one of those Leigh movies where it all comes together for him, fusing into a drama that’s 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, “What’s not to like?” But Watching “Tender Loving Care,” I had the sense of wanting Leigh to go deeper into his characters — into the dreams holding their lives together, and the trauma underlying their daily grind. Leigh doesn’t make any wrong moves here; just about every scene in the movie plays. Yet “Tender Loving Care” builds (or maybe I should say recedes) to something more schematic than it is powerful.
