Cinema: A Fable for Postmoderns

HIGH HOPES Directed and Written by Mike Leigh

There was an old woman who lived in a semidetached shoe box. She had two too many children, who didn't know what to do in Margaret Thatcher's England. And neither did their spouses, their lovers, their friends, their neighbors or, for that matter, the little old lady.

Maybe Mike Leigh's High Hopes is too realistic and too intricate to be called a nursery rhyme for moderns. But he and his actors and designers do push out beyond the purely naturalistic. All the figures in his dismal urban landscape carry a carefully calculated moral...

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