A Fable for Postmoderns

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

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 weight, and their story is clearly intended as a microcosmic portrait of contemporary English life. So call it, perhaps, a fable on the sneak. And call it something else too: yet another carefully handmade ornament of the new British cinema, which includes such small recent marvels as My Beautiful Laundrette; Rita, Sue and Bob Too; Withnail and I and Wish You Were Here.

Leigh, whose rigorous improvisational techniques have made him a guru of British theater (Goose-Pimples) and TV (Abigail's Party) for two decades, brings to his work the same anti-Thatcher animus that energizes much of today's British cinema. But unlike Laundrette and the rest, High Hopes derives much of its energy and some of its best comic strokes from a conscious, open acknowledgment that to be postmodern is also to be post-Marxist. In a time when people rise and fall freely, unhindered by traditional class structures, they become, according to Leigh, quite unhinged by their inability to locate themselves morally or emotionally on a sturdy social ladder.

To be sure, the film's central symbolic figure, the widowed Mrs. Bender (Edna Dore, whose senile silences speak volumes) has a safe place in that house, superficially unchanged since she raised her children. But she is, in fact, the last holdout on a gentrifying block, and the world beyond it has become utterly incomprehensible to her. Indeed, the movie's most crucial and comic scene occurs when she locks herself out and must apply to her silly- deadly, yup-scale neighbors for help.

But Mrs. Bender's offspring are in their ways almost as unhelpful as these strangers. Her daughter Valerie (Heather Tobias, in the movie's only overwrought, misjudged performance) can buy everything but common sense and fills life's emptiness with a riot of ugly possessions. Her son Cyril (Philip Davis) has gone the opposite route. He is a leftover leftist who cannot abandon the habit of Marxist analysis but is unable to believe any longer in its power to effect change.

The light of all these lives is Cyril's live-in girlfriend Shirley (Ruth Sheen), buck-toothed and, in her self-effacing way, greathearted. Quietly, she has turned their dark, cramped flat into a haven for waifs and strays (including, finally, Mrs. Bender). Quietly too she tends her struggling rooftop garden and keeps trying to talk Cyril into having a child. What can you do these days but make a warm place to nurture people -- and some small hopes for a less harum-scarum future? Perhaps pause to admire a brave and subtle film that knowingly explores ideas, even ideologies, but never dries up emotionally -- a film that never puts its characters' duties to metaphor ahead of their prime obligation, which is to live and breathe and squawk their wayward humanity.