Life Is Sweet
Director: Mike Leigh
Year Released: 1990
Rating: 2.0
It takes approximately one hour and thirty minutes for this film to build to the scene it should have come to much earlier; the rest of the time it screws around, the family we're supposed to like is composed of a weak-minded father (Jim Broadbent), a cackling mother (Alison Steadman), two daughters (one is a masculine snob, the other a whining anorexic), the father's friend, who happens to be a con-artist, and their sexist bourgeois-wanna-be restaurateur, played by Timothy Spall, who Leigh has acting like a retard (compare this performance to the one in Secrets & Lies). The ending, which wants us to believe that things are going to get better, is force-fed; the only person in the film that has his head on his shoulders is the massively underrated David Thewlis, who plays the one daughter's lover.
