Movie Review

Directed by Mike Leigh; Starring: Timothy Spall (Phil), Lesley Manville (Penny), James Carden (Rory), Alison Garland (Rachel), Rutgh Sheen (Maureen), 2hrs 20 min, 2002.

Phil is a taxi driver in London. He's kind of hapless both at home and at work. He's fat and doesn't get up in time to actually get any well paying fares and many of those he does get rip him off. Most of the time he just looks baffled and overcome by circumstance. His partner, Penny, (they aren't married) is thin, shrill and driven. She works in the checkout at Safeway, feels put upon by Phil and is very anxious about her two children who are young adults still living with their parents in a council flat somewhere in London. Both of the children are obese. Rachel works as a cleaner in an 'old folk's home'. Rory lies around the apartment all day when he is not terrorizing younger children playing on the parking lot below the apartment. He is VERY angry; consumed with self-loathing for his size, lack of work and lack of ambition. Their lives are lived in quiet desperation along with the several other families of the apartment block.

Penny's neighbour, Maureen is a relatively cheerful person who takes in ironing and tries to guide her teenage daughter through an abusive relationship with the angry young thug who has made her pregnant. Penny and Maureen often go to the pub together with another friend who is, alas, a falling down drunk. She is also the wife of Phil's fellow taxi driver. How do you like it so far? These are not attractive characters! They are, in Matthew's terms, "harassed and harried, like sheep without a shepherd".

One day, Rory in one of his rages with younger kids, has a heart attack and collapses on the parking lot. It is Maureen, beset as she is by her own family troubles, who finds him, gets help and stays at the hospital to comfort Penny when she finally arrives after being contacted at work. As luck would have it Phil had chosen that very moment to turn off his radio and phone and escape for a while to the seaside! Penny is beside herself with anger and worry and berates Phil for his uselessness.

At this point we expect Phil to knuckle under once more to being berated but in a surprisingly spirited moment Phil confronts her attitude and challenges her as to whether she loves him or not. Penny is speechless for once and afterwards asks her daughter, who has left in the face of one more familiar tirade, whether it is true that she is always "berating Phil". Christ like, Rachel is able to speak the truth that needs to be spoken. "Yes you do, Mom."

There is a theme in Christian Theology that The Messiah always turns up as "the least expected one". We see an echo of that theme in the Parable of The Good Samaritan. In this film, help does come from an unexpected quarter but like the parable it is not just an illustration of "help other people at all times and obey the Scout Law". That is a commonplace wisdom that hardly seems worth risking execution for. However, parables are stories about "the first named". So, "a man went down…" It is a Parable of Grace about the man in the ditch. Grace strikes only those who cannot expect it and are in no position to refuse it when offered. Parables are also unfinished stories. We do not know whether the man in the ditch recovers or The Samaritan comes back. We do not know whether The Prodigal Son is able to bear all the attention and actually stays beyond the party. Nor in this film do we know whether the crisis of commitment for Phil and Penny will result in their All or whether Nothing ensues. This Ironic story yields no enduring happy ending. What it does chronicle is the striking of Grace in the stuff of ordinary and apparently unreligious lives, lives that are not, in the details, far distant from our own.