This is typical Mike Leigh -- putting a friendly microscope to the whispered glorification of the british working class, by putting a critical microscope to the yuppie and grasping upper class.
It's a slow, quiet trudge that follows the most sensible, mature, compassionate people in the movie -- a quiet thirty-something marxist-leaning post-hippie couple trying to make it through life amidst the challenges of both the meek and the obnoxious people in their lives.
My biggest issue with this is that, in his effort to show how normal the marxists are, writer/director Leigh takes liberties to depict the yuppies and class aspirants as ridiculously grotesque, to the point of being unbelievably offensive. It's so unreal that it loses me in its social pantomime.
Like in Leigh's movie two years later, LIFE IS SWEET, Leigh likes to let his actors soar with their own eccentricities, so much so that it seems they're adlibbing half the lines and half their situations. That may work for the marxist filmmaking school, but it can be distracting to the point of constant irritation, namely Heather Tobias as Valerie. She was told to play toxically neurotic, and she overplays it with so much enthusiasm and artistic freedom, that it's utterly unbelievable in its grotesqueness. Very much like Tim Spall's character Aubrey in Life Is Sweet, an eccentric child like idiot who supposedly runs a restaurant, when in real life, such a person couldn't run a porta-john.
If Leigh didn't let so many of his actors run amok with so many pointless eccentricities, his films would probably have wider audiences (not that his work hasn't been abundantly acclaimed and rewarded). The stories don't need so much weirdness; this movie loses some of its power and narrative drive because of it.
I bet this story resonated more in 1988 UK than it does in today's U. S.
