‘There’s nothing rational about grief…’
Family dynamics are hard. Especially as you get older and kids come into the mix and people’s lives become ever more entangled and complicated. People make mistakes. Families have secrets. So it has been and so it ever will be. We rarely see this communicated effectively on screen, however. This is perhaps mainly down to the fact that we don’t want to be reminded of the difficult complexities of family life. If cinema is supposed to be an escape, then watching a different family to mine arguing about all the same stuff that my family argues about doesn’t really feel like much of a holiday. Secrets & Lies forces us to confront familial politics, and it does so wonderfully…
Mother and daughter duo Cynthia (Brenda Blethyn) and Roxanne (Claire Rushbrook) live in uneasy harmony in an East London flat. The former has passed on her fears and insecurities to her daughter and they mainly spend their time bickering and smoking. The arrival of Cynthia’s estranged daughter Hortense (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) and the return of her brother Maurice (Timothy Spall) sparks off a domino effect that will change their lives forever.
Writer/director Mike Leigh does a great job in making this unremarkable family feel lived in and authentic. As with Ken Loach, Leigh has made a successful career out of kitchen sink dramas, and Secret & Lies is perhaps the pinnacle of his particular oeuvre. Indeed, this is Leigh’s most successful film – nominated for five Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director (eventually losing out in all five categories). Spall is a regular collaborator with Leigh and he is typically wonderful here, imbuing everyman Maurice with an innate sense of decency, but it is Blethyn was steals the show in a turn that will be familiar for anyone whose family contains a wildcard (if your family doesn’t have one then you are probably the wildcard…).
Secrets & Lies is a wonderfully acted pressure cooker of a film that goes off in some style in the third act. While watching Blethyn worry and fret for over two hours is quite exhausting, it’s also rewarding. This is a film that is draped in humanity and smothered in shared experience. Everybody will look at Cynthia or Maurice or Roxanne and shudder with recognition of people from their own lives. This is Leigh’s greatest skill as a filmmaker.