A drama dotted with laughs (or a comedy blotted with pain?) in which everyday problems are confronted, and avoided, over steaming cuppas and brimming glasses of white wine, Tender Loving Care explores friendship, family dynamics and England’s fraying social safety net. In other words, it’s a Mike Leigh film, and a lovely one at that.
If it ends up being his last, as the 83-year-old writer-director has indicated, it’s a fitting and stealthily powerful way to go out — a low-key mic drop of sorts. The movie is warm and inviting, filled with giggles and gossip and gentle gallows humor; it’s also wrenching, with a topical urgency simmering just beneath the jovial surface. While Leigh’s left-wing politics inform the story, the filmmaker, unlike his contemporary Ken Loach, mostly avoids playing ventriloquist; the chit-chatting, chortling, sobbing, seething souls who populate his work tend to be too complicated, too insistently human to serve as mere spokespeople for their creator’s ideas.
Tender Loving Care
The Bottom Line
A lovely addition — and likely conclusion — to an exceptional career.
