Edna Dore as Mrs Bender is one of the saddest performances/characters ever created, especially as one realizes with Leigh through direct collaboration, in an English speaking drama. Any time his camera is on her face for an extended period, you just want her to fly away out of there like Marcello in 8 1/2. On the other side, Lesly Manville in her supporting role as one of the hoity-toitiest women you could ever not want to come across, but she appears vital and real and makes what seems like a cartoon character on the surface to still have a level of sympathy (or... no maybe not, but she isn't as thin as a Hollywood movie would show her, she's made out of someone she and Leigh saw in their lives).
High Hopes has a few laughs here and there, like that desperate moment with the chess table or some off-the-cuff lines (Mrs Bender's reaction to the skeleton poster on the wall); but this is a dramatic story in a few days of these people from strikingly different class strata - the Socialists (or one should say the Aspiring Socialists Stuck in the Capitalist Machine) and the Conservatives (the ones who have exercise bikes in their homes and put on lots of jewelry and make up and think stuff will be their salvation) - and how the personal is always political and visa versa.
It's hard not to think about how Leigh draws the so to speak "types" here, and it's no confusion where his sympathies lie, nd the Cyril and Shirley characters, for all their problems and his prickly nature, are more warmly drawn than Mrs Bender's kids who are much more dysfunctional (and the one daughter is practically having a nervous breakdown in that birthday scene, goodness that's powerful work).
But what I come away with and why it makes an impression as being more than a savagely satirical rap on how the anti-Thatcherites and the Thatcherites of the period saw one another is that Leigh has the core idea about family and the impact of what someone does or actively doesnt do for others (or forces someone to do when its clear its not the right time, again that nightmare of a birthday "party"): people have kids in some large part because they can give to them, and then by a point some day they can give back to their elders. Ultimately, Cyril does come around to the idea of having a child, and it doesn't have to do with his love of Marx or his political ideologies, rather that it simply would be good to care for someone else and to create a life with this woman he loves so deeply.
If the contrasts are drawn by the director, and to come back to how his characters and actors are mixing together the personal and political, it's in how people should simply not be so indifferent and/or brutal and uncaring, and that so much (if not practically all) of the political strife in the world, especially from Conservatives, comes from self centeredness and a pathological unwillingness to do much for someone who simply needs help (or, say, to get their purse and keys in a moment of common elderly confusion... no wait that was me the other day, but I digress). Very good movie.
High Hopes has a few laughs here and there, like that desperate moment with the chess table or some off-the-cuff lines (Mrs Bender's reaction to the skeleton poster on the wall); but this is a dramatic story in a few days of these people from strikingly different class strata - the Socialists (or one should say the Aspiring Socialists Stuck in the Capitalist Machine) and the Conservatives (the ones who have exercise bikes in their homes and put on lots of jewelry and make up and think stuff will be their salvation) - and how the personal is always political and visa versa.
It's hard not to think about how Leigh draws the so to speak "types" here, and it's no confusion where his sympathies lie, nd the Cyril and Shirley characters, for all their problems and his prickly nature, are more warmly drawn than Mrs Bender's kids who are much more dysfunctional (and the one daughter is practically having a nervous breakdown in that birthday scene, goodness that's powerful work).
But what I come away with and why it makes an impression as being more than a savagely satirical rap on how the anti-Thatcherites and the Thatcherites of the period saw one another is that Leigh has the core idea about family and the impact of what someone does or actively doesnt do for others (or forces someone to do when its clear its not the right time, again that nightmare of a birthday "party"): people have kids in some large part because they can give to them, and then by a point some day they can give back to their elders. Ultimately, Cyril does come around to the idea of having a child, and it doesn't have to do with his love of Marx or his political ideologies, rather that it simply would be good to care for someone else and to create a life with this woman he loves so deeply.
If the contrasts are drawn by the director, and to come back to how his characters and actors are mixing together the personal and political, it's in how people should simply not be so indifferent and/or brutal and uncaring, and that so much (if not practically all) of the political strife in the world, especially from Conservatives, comes from self centeredness and a pathological unwillingness to do much for someone who simply needs help (or, say, to get their purse and keys in a moment of common elderly confusion... no wait that was me the other day, but I digress). Very good movie.