Two years ago, British director Mike Leigh hit the festival circuit with a movie titled “Hard Truths,” and the first word of that title told you all you had to know about its harrowing tale of a woman consumed by anger and pain. This year, he’s back with a film called “Tender Loving Care” – and again, that first word nicely sums up the movie.
His 2024 film was hard and his 2026 one is tender, and they’re both brilliant. At the age of 83, the director responsible for “Secrets & Lies,” “Topsy-Turvy,” “Vera Drake,” “Another Year” and “Mr. Turner,” among others, still makes films that are richly humanistic marvels. Starting with a singular process in which he and his actors build their characters from the ground up and then figure out where the story might take them, he makes movies in which it seems wrong to use the word characters; these are just people who happen to be living in front of Leigh’s unobtrusive camera.
The superpower of this essential filmmaker has always been the empathy that is built into the way he makes movies, and “Tender Loving Care,” which had its world premiere on Friday at the Telluride Film Festival, makes full use of that power. It’s a gentle little gem, in no hurry to get anywhere – and if it does turn out to be Leigh’s final film, as he has suggested, it will stand as a touching and apt sendoff to a movie-business unicorn.
The film begins with a typically trying day in the life of Amy Spooner, played by the newly-minted Emmy nominee Kate O’Flynn from “Widow’s Bay.” She’s a social worker trying to arrange matters for a stubbornly uncooperative old man who’s about to be released from the hospital after suffering a heart attack, but who doesn’t appear to have any place to go.
For Amy and her colleagues, dealing with difficult patients in trying circumstances is part of the daily routine in an era of cuts in health care and social services. After work, she hangs out with a few friends, notably Alice Bailey Johnson’s Rosie, and trade stories about their disappointing love lives: Amy has just split up with a longtime boyfriend, while Rosie has what she thinks is a promising relationship until her beau-to-be doesn’t show up for their first serious date.
But even in private, the women appear determined not to let the frustration and sadness show; instead, they pour another glass of wine and pretend to have a good time while Gary Yershon’s sparse but sprightly music plays along, insisting in its own way that things are just fine.
Their conversations are a case study in forced gaiety, but the film drops hints that they know what they’re doing and what they’re covering up. When Amy and Rosie dance around the kitchen singing, they choose East 17’s “House of Love,” a 1992 hit based on a Brit boy band’s insistence that a world in crisis could be cured by a night on the dance floor.
And when Amy meets up with her elderly parents, Birdie and Geoff (Marion Bailey and Paul Jessup, both scene-stealers), she leads a singalong of the Platters’ doo-wop classic “The Great Pretender,” a song that pretty much sums up these lives: “Oh yes, I’m the great pretender / Pretending that I’m doing well.”
But that pretending reveals something true, too; it is a conscious choice to embrace the light, a choice that tells us plenty about Amy and Rosie and Birdie and Geoff, as do the occasional bits of memory that emerge along the way. Where “Hard Truths” was dominated by the darkness and rage in which Marianne Jean-Baptiste’s character chose to dwell, “Tender Loving Care” is animated by a refusal to let anger or despair become overwhelming, no matter that the circumstances of their lives might well justify that choice.
Because this is a Mike Leigh film, those circumstances are less important than the texture. In the hands of a remarkable cast that fashioned their characters in collaboration with their director before a plot even existed, these people reach for their wine glasses and shrug off their disappointments and do their best.
As the title suggests, they care for one another. But more than that, Mike Leigh and his actors care for them, and that means we do, too.
Bleecker Street will open “Tender Loving Care” in the U.S. in early December.
