Grown-Ups (1980)

Grown-Ups is a 1990 film by Mike Leigh produced by the BBC. Starring Leigh regulars Phil Davis and Lesley Manville, as well as a wonderful supporting cast helmed by the incredible Brenda Blethyn, Grown-Ups follows the travails of young couple Dick and Mandy (Davis and Manville) as they move into a new council house. Dick and Mandy are assisted, or harassed, in their efforts to settle in by Mandy's sister Gloria, played with a delirious mania by Blethyn. Gloria fails miserably to understand when she is not wanted and, increasingly pushed out by her and Mandy's mother, intrudes more and more on the young couple's privacy. Eventually, Dick and Mandy's attempts to shoo Gloria away spill over, quite violently into the next door neighbours' house, the placid Ralph and Christine Butcher (played with great verve by Sam Kelley and Lindsay Duncan). Ralph and Christine are teachers, Ralph having taught a young Dick and Mandy. Their lives, in contrast to the low-brow pursuits of their neighbours, are prim and regular. Ralph is both horribly pedantic and horribly childish, while Christine, desperate for love and a family, operates with a laconic wit and laudable restraint, managing to maintain her cool despite Ralph's boorish carrying-ons. When Gloria, practically psychotic with desperation, is pushed into the Butchers' home following the climactic "row," Christine is ironically given what she has longed for, someone to mother. Meanwhile, Dick and Mandy, at their wits end, recover from this dust-up, Dick finally relenting to Mandy's wish to have a baby. The film ends with both families more or less reconciled, though in typical Leigh fashion, no simplistic resolutions are arrived at. Gloria is still overbearing and Christine deeply unsatisfied, however, through their dramatic encounter with one another, both sides have achieved some kind of cathartic release.

Grown-Ups finds Leigh rounding into his more modern form, following on 1979's solid Who's Who. Feeling like a fully-fleshed feature film, as opposed to the somewhat half-baked dramas of his early career, Grown-Ups features many, by now, familiar Leigh tropes. Both Christine and Mandy are hard-done-by wives, dealing with petulant, childish husbands. They both "get on," in classic Leigh fashion, despite their lackluster partners. There is also the predominant concern with babies. Both women, in very different ways, yearn for children. Mandy is very upfront with Dick about her desire while Christine's simmers below the surface, percolating in thinly veiled comments before exploding out angrily at the end. These are women desperate to settle in and get on with family life, while their husbands seem content to be cared for, like insolent children. This tension, between feminine and male desires, ties this drama together, uniting the two women in a seemingly hopeless quest for domestic harmony and progress. Leigh is expert at identifying humane allegiance between disparate people, and illustrating this in an unpretentious, un-didactic manner.

Like all of Leigh's best work, the performances in Grown-Ups are sterling. Davis and Manville are perfect as the casually feuding Dick and Mandy, while Blethyn is a force of nature as the barely-hinged Gloria. Duncan and Kelley are similarly great as the prim teachers, a perfect foil to their slobby neighbors. Blethyn's magnificent performances in Grown-Ups and Secrets and Lies, makes one wish her and Leigh worked together more often. Blethyn is so excellent at tempering her odd, almost screwball comic tendencies, with a heartbreaking sensitivity. The character of Gloria is unceasingly obnoxious yet supremely endearing. She is incapable of not annoying people, yet it is clear she is nothing but well-intentioned.

Grown-Ups shows Mike Leigh rounding into his present form, demonstrating the visual control and balance of zany comedy and startling intimacy that informs his best films. While not quite reaching the heights of some of his later works Grown-Ups is an excellent early film, and an interesting incubator for many of his most central preoccupations.