By Jason Osiason
Mike Leigh’s Tender Loving Care is a difficult movie to write about while you’re still upset with it. I wanted more of the family dinners and the bickering, more time to laugh at people who were becoming terribly familiar. Leigh gives us plenty, but I would have happily stayed longer. By the end, I was thinking about my father, which made concentrating on the film as something I was supposed to review considerably harder.
Kate O’Flynn’s Amy and Alice Bailey Johnson’s Rosie are best friends and social workers. Caring for people is literally the job, the thing they’re trained in and paid for and good at. Amy’s own life is in boxes in Rosie’s spare room. Her parents are getting old in the specific way where you don’t notice until you do, and being good at helping other people hasn’t made her especially good at handling this. I appreciated how little Leigh feels obliged to explain that connection. Amy has enough going on without having to deliver the movie’s thesis.
Paul Jesson plays her dad like a man who’s been telling the same three jokes since 1979 and still can’t believe they land. The affection I felt for him surprised me. Leigh lets us get used to the bickering, the chair, the way he and his wife still look at each other like they got away with something. Then things start changing, so slowly that I kept thinking I’d misread a moment. I’ve seen a lot of movies about aging parents. Letting the dad be this funny first makes a difference. I was attached to the things Amy was attached to, and just as reluctant to see them go.
O’Flynn’s Amy is the person at every party who’s fine, she’s fine, has anybody checked on the one who’s clearly not fine? There’s something almost irritating about how readily she turns her attention elsewhere, because you want somebody to persist with the question. O’Flynn makes you watch for what Amy won’t volunteer. She does so much with her face while another person is talking, letting a reaction register before Amy has quite managed to conceal it. I don’t mean that she spends the film looking quietly miserable. There’s humor and affection there, too, which makes the effort of carrying on much more convincing.
I loved how much of the dialogue concerns things nobody would bother remembering afterward. Buses, boyfriends, what’s for dinner. Leigh gives these conversations room, and the actors sound comfortable having them. They aren’t rushing toward the important part. Sometimes someone says something that hurts, and the conversation continues before you’ve had time to decide why. I found that particularly close to being with family: realizing a little late that a remark has bothered you, then sitting with it while everyone discusses something else.
I’m not going to tell you what happens at the end. It crushed me, and then somehow it held me, and I still don’t totally understand how a movie does both inside the same minute. I’m grateful Leigh doesn’t explain the feeling away. There’s enough in O’Flynn’s face, enough in everything we’ve watched, to let us sit with it. I wanted another scene with her. I suspect I would have wanted another after that, too. [A-]
