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Ray
Carney's The Films of Mike Leigh is quite simply the
best book of film criticism I have ever read.
Now I have to say
that I have never read any of Carney's other books (he has
also written books on Cassavetes, Frank Capra, and Carl Dreyer),
which, for all I know, might be even better. But as a friend
of mine put it, 'His writing blows everything else out there
away, even to the point of many times seeming like simply
in a class of his own...different in kind more than degree.'
And although I admit to not having read 'everything else out
there,' I feel the exact same way. Ray Carney's new book has
undeniably rocked my world.
Ray Carney's book
is to what usually passes for film criticism what Mike Leigh's
movies are to what, in Hollywood, usually passes for filmmaking:
a truly radical critique, a whole different animal, and a
solitary voice of sanity that has somehow miraculously managed
to make itself heard over the noise and hullabaloo of this
culture's present-day insanity. |
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–Caveh
Zahedi, creator of A Little Stiff and I Don't Hate
Las
Vegas Anymore,
in a review in Filmmaker Magazine |
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Mike Leigh’s work is difficult to pin down. Echoing what Ray Carney says of Leigh’s more blinkered characters, examining these films becomes a lot murkier when you bring too many ideas and film-critical categories to bear. Although not without its strengths and serendipities, Garry Watson’s book suffers from intellectual larding while, like one of Leigh’s more far-sighted characters, Carney and Quart’s gets in amongst the rough-and-tumble....
The Carney and Quart book was the first critical study of Leigh’s work and every subsequent book on Leigh must negotiate its rigor and insight. I have yet to read a book that better approximates my experience of watching Leigh’s films.My one regret is that, apart from the important BBC plays Nuts in May and Abigail’s Party (1977), I have yet to see many of the early works wherein Carney locates the wellspring of Leigh’s improvisatory power and vision.
Animating this study is a distinction between two types
of Leigh characters that resonates culturally, politically and
spiritually across his work. For Carney, there are those like
Rupert and Laetitia Boothe-Braine in High Hopes (1988),
Nicola in Life Is Sweet (1990), and Sebastian in Naked (1993)
who, mired in a mental image of themselves, pigeon-hole
others in prejudices, effectively foreclosing on generous and
responsive solidarity. Then there are those like Cyril and
Shirley in High Hopes, Wendy in Life Is Sweet, and Louise in Naked who have all the foibles, strengths, and self-doubts of
their humanity, and are open to the flows of human interaction.
Alison Steadman’s giggly and affectionate Wendy still
epitomizes the principle of social cohesion in Leigh. It is perhaps
unsurprising that Steadman and Leigh were married,
while the positive response to the density of experience recalls
the thick descriptive methodology through which a Leigh
film is arrived at. Evoking the Dickensian and Lawrentian
views of human sensibility (as Watson points out), Leigh feels
that the individual mindset has consequences for the wider
culture, and by this light the generous impulse in Wendy and
other Leigh characters has been eroded by consumerism and
social mobility in postwar Britain. Not as overtly political as
Ken Loach, Leigh has nevertheless chronicled the domestic
consequences of the decline of the social consensus imagined
by writers from Dickens to George Orwell.
One of the most unexpected aspects of Carney and Quart’s book is the way it puts mainstream American cinema in perspective by comparing it with Leigh’s cinema.With his focus on characters as mannered and tic-ridden “outsides” (as opposed to Hollywood’s granting us access to Forrest Gump’s inner kindness despite the goofy exterior), Leigh charts that elusive quality, the “ordinary” moment—the everyday drama of interaction they never show in Hollywood because it occurs between the heroics.
In doing so, Carney shows, Leigh pulls apart the Enlightenment model of agency and volition on which most American movies depend. Recalling classes he has taught—he is Director of Film Studies at Boston University—Carney describes how Americans are often perplexed by a cinema in which nothing seems to happen. But Leigh’s drama of transformation is rooted in the layered rehearsal of interpersonal dynamics observed with the patience of a European Ozu. Whilst British Leigh commentators have been preoccupied with the writer-director’s purchase on the sociological landscape, Carney convinces us that Leigh and Ozu share a feeling for the interplay of performance and mise-en-scène which moves beyond David Bordwell’s pioneering Ozu dichotomy between modernism and tradition. Leigh’s conception of experience (unlike that of Hollywood) is durational rather than deadlined, heterogeneous rather than hurried. Carney’s examination of space and time in Leigh reveals, as Bordwell has done elsewhere, that the mainstream model of experience conceals as much as it reveals.... |
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–excerpted from: Richard Armstrong, a review of Gary Watson, The Cinema of Mike Leigh and Ray Carney and Leonard Quart, The Films of Mike Leigh: Embracing the World, published in Film Quarterly, Dec 2005, Vol. 59, No. 2, pp. 62-63 |
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Ray Carney, The
Films of Mike Leigh: Embracing the World (New York and Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2000), 13 illustrations, paperback,
290 pages. This book is available directly from the author for $20.
 Mike
Leigh is a maverick British independent who, for nearly 30 years,
has
been producing eccentric, unique, and almost uncategorizable works. Though
his career dates back to 1971, with a film called Bleak Moments,
Leigh has worked in obscurity for most of that time, coming to the
attention
of an international audience only with his recent productions of Naked,
Secrets and Lies, Career Girls, and Topsy-Turvy.
Working in a similar
way to that of Robert Altman, John Cassavetes, and Tom Noonan, Leigh
begins with a small group of actors around whom he builds his films
during months of private rehearsal. There is no script at the start.
It is written as he goes along.
The films–which include
Abigail’s Party, Meantime, Home Sweet Home,
High Hopes, and Life is Sweet–are brilliant, outrageous,
iconoclastic–and hilarious. Leigh's work has been both ridiculed
by some and celebrated by others as among the greatest filmmaking
of the twentieth century.
This study argues, among
other things, that part of the misunderstanding of Leigh's work
has been the result of misclassifying him as a British "realist"
in the tradition of Osborne and Loach, when in fact his films are
far stranger and more artistically daring. The Films of Mike
Leigh: Embracing the World makes the case for regarding Leigh
as one of the great artists of the century.
This is the first comprehensive
critical appreciation of Leigh's work ever written, and it offers
insights not only into this unusual filmmaker's strange and often
baffling movies, but into film itself as a way of knowing and understanding
the world. This book offers nothing less than a radically new way
of understanding both life and art.
* * *
This book is available
through Amazon,
Barnes
and Noble, your local bookseller, or, for a limited time, directly
from the author (in discounted and specially autographed editions).
Advance copies may be ordered now. If you order prior to publication,
your "first edition" copy will be mailed to you the day
the book becomes available (and before it is generally available
in bookstores).
To obtain a copy directly
from the author (please stipulate if you would like an inscription
or autograph on the inside front cover), please send $20 (US
Postal Money Order only) with your name and address, and the title
of the book you are ordering, to the following address. (Domestic
US orders only.)
Ray Carney
Special Book Offer
College of Communication
640 Commonwealth Avenue
Boston University
Boston, MA 02215
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