(3 of 4)
This is naturalism bent into ferocious misanthropy. The characters practice traditional English courtesy as if it is a vaguely remembered religious rite observed in the letter but not the spirit. And often they don't bother. Leigh's first TV film, the 1973 Hard Labour, has barely a kind word in its 73 minutes; even the nun to whom the saintly lead character offers charity is snarky and ungrateful.
Each face carries a grudge. The men mutter and growl and get fall-down drunk. The women wheedle and whine. Or they knit furiously, like Lindsay Duncan in Grown-Ups, as if rehearsing to put her unloving husband's eyes out. Or they throw insults like darts. "Drop dead!" shouts the pretentious Beverly (Steadman) at her husband in Abigail's Party (1977); two minutes later, he does. The hate-filled wife in Home Sweet Home is an adulterer, but infidelity with her husband's best friend gives the woman no more pleasure than anything else in her sorry life. There is a majestic contempt on display here--loathing raised to an art form.
And that is just the working class, to whom Leigh, a Jewish doctor's son who grew up in the working-class Midlands city of Salford, feels some kinship. His films are mostly unforgiving to the upper-middle class and those who would join it. Nuts in May (1975) is a drolly unfair comedy about two educated twits on a camping holiday, seeking to be at one with nature and above base humanity. Who's Who (1978) turns a stockbroker into a toady of Dickensian breadth.
With Four Days in July (1985), the tone mellowed; Leigh was kind to both the Catholics and the Protestants of Belfast--though the Republicans had the funnier lines. High Hopes saves its venom for the hilariously rendered posh types and poseurs; toward its central couple of fuzzy Marxists, the film dares to be sweetly sentimental. In Life Is Sweet and especially Secrets & Lies, the working-class families are observed, warts and all, with an insider's love and forgiveness. "One way or another, all my films are about roots and families," says Leigh. "One of my cousins saw Secrets & Lies and said, 'Oh, there we are all again.'"
Leigh denies an explicit strain of autobiography in Secrets & Lies. He does say, "There are people close to me, whom I can't talk about, who have had adoption-related experiences. I also had a notion to do something with a generation of black people who are growing up and moving on. And we had some research about black babies born to white women in the '50s and '60s. But did I know the story? No. Those are the sorts of things one discovers by making the film."
Secrets & Lies is rich in humor, pained or frolicking. Blethyn's Cynthia is an especially voluptuous creation, with her carelessly dyed hair and mincing steps, her metallic, baby-doll voice that calls everyone darlin' or sweetie, her habit of puddling into tears as her life spins out of control.