Secrets & Lies (1996)

Directed by Mike Leigh. Starring Brenda Blethyn, Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Timothy Spall, Claire Rushbrook, Phyllis Logan, Elizabeth Berrington, Michele Austin, Lee Ross, Ron Cook, Lesley Manville. [R]

Some movies require a specific delicacy and reclaimed stability to work out, and this is certainly one of them. Writer/director Leigh must have studied the scenario and actors carefully to have seen how to reach equilibrium among its disparate elements because not only does it not all spin out of control, but it actually becomes more engrossing as it goes along. Narrative concerns a strained family relationship involving single working class mother Blethyn, her baseborn daughter (Rushbrook), her estranged brother (Spall), his domineering wife (Rushbrook), and so on; those strains will soon be tested even further by Jean-Baptiste, an optometrist who decides to trace her origins back to her birth mother after her adoptive mother passes away, and that birth mother happens to be Blethyn. Despite a slow start and a tendency to let a few scenes dawdle too long in the manner of a stage play, nearly all of the frailties and flaws are counteracted as the story threads get joined, effectively blending character-based humor with heartfelt poignancy. Consider Blethyn’s shrill squeak of a voice, which should prove an irritant but becomes an almost endearing quirk the more that the character grows on the viewer, her emotional wreckage healed in unexpected hands; or, for that matter, consider how the film handles the most immediately glaring aspect of the revelation—Jean-Baptiste is a black woman, but Blethyn is white—by not making it a prejudicial point of emphasis. Imperfect but beautifully realized and wonderfully performed, and although it’s something of a challenge at the outset, it becomes nearly impossible to look away by the end. Won the Palme d’Or at Cannes.

81/100