Leonard Maltin's 151 Best Movies You've Never Seen - Maltin, Leonard [10]
This is the main reason Leigh’s films don’t resemble one another, and why even his staunchest admirers (like me) don’t know what to expect. I haven’t loved all of his work, but for me there are definitely more hits than misses, and his best films (High Hopes, Life Is Sweet, Secrets & Lies, Topsy-Turvy, Happy-Go-Lucky) have garnered widespread acclaim.
Secrets & Lies was perhaps his greatest success, earning five Oscar nominations, including Best Picture, and it played to a wider audience than he’d ever reached before. Newcomers to the fold were surprised, then, when his follow-up effort was so different in its ambitions, and in its tone. Yet taken on its own terms, Career Girls is quite wonderful.
Leigh explores working-class Brits the way John Osborne and the creators of the famous “kitchen sink” school did in their plays and films of the 1950s and early ’60s. In this case, his heroines are two former roommates who are reunited after six years’ time. As Annie (Lynda Steadman) visits Hannah (Katrin Cartlidge) in her London flat and the two begin to reminisce, flashbacks fill us in on their college lives, and the rather dramatic transformations their personalities have undergone since they were young, when Hannah was a mass of tics and Annie was, in her friend’s words, “a walking open wound.”
Both their shared memories and current experiences revolve around men and their misadventures with the opposite sex. At one point they run into a man they both dated once upon a time, who caused their friendship considerable stress—yet he doesn’t remember either one of them.
If you’re still wondering about the story line, you apparently don’t know Mike Leigh’s movies. Career Girls doesn’t really have a story, per se; it’s a character portrait of two young women who have matured since their giddy youth but still haven’t figured out where they belong in the scheme of things. All we know is that they’re trying to get along, and in the process, they come to realize how much their friendship has meant.
If you become attuned to the leisurely rhythm of Leigh’s work, and immerse yourself in the workaday world of his characters, Career Girls is exceedingly satisfying entertainment. It also features two terrific performances, by Lynda Steadman and Katrin Cartlidge (who later appeared in Leigh’s Topsy-Turvy). It’s sad to note that this gifted actress, whose career was on the rise—and who received particular acclaim for her work in Career Girls—died in 2002.
Two other footnotes: the music for this film was composed by Tony Remy and Marianne Jean-Baptiste, who was nominated for an Oscar for her breakthrough role in Leigh’s Secrets & Lies—and who then became a fixture on TV’s long-running series Without a Trace.
And the showy role of a weed-smoking, self-styled ladies’ man who propositions Cartlidge is played by Andy Serkis, who later gained screen immortality as Gollum in The Lord of the Rings.
13. CASANOVA
(2005)
Directed by Lasse Hallström
Screenplay by Jeffrey Hatcher and Kimberly Simi
Story by Kimberly Simi and Michael Christofer
Actors:
HEATH LEDGER
SIENNA MILLER
JEREMY IRONS
OLIVER PLATT
LENA OLIN
OMID DJALILI
STEPHEN GREIF
KEN STOTT
HELEN MCCRORY
CHARLIE COX
NATALIE DORMER
TIM MCINNERNY
LEIGH LAWSON
LAUREN COHAN
Whenever a talented actor is cut down in the prime of life, it’s left to fans and pundits to speculate about what might have been. But in the case of Heath Ledger, one of his best (and most endearing) performances was roundly ignored at the peak of his youthful career. Released right after Brokeback Mountain, which netted Ledger an Oscar nomination, Casanova was given a desultory theatrical release at the busiest time of the movie year, Christmas 2005, and never made