HH - Mike Leigh (Assessment) Flashcards
A correlation between characterisation and style of acting is clearly evidence in High Hopes where the most sympathetic characters, Mrs. Bender, Cyril, and Shirley, are largely played without the exaggerated mannerisms that typify the playing of the Burkes and the Gore-Booths.
This downplaying of ‘performance’ not only permits a degree of involvement with these characters which is denied to the others but also takes a certain ‘______’ character.
Moral
If the Burkes and Gore-Booths embody the shortcomings (an spiritual emptiness) of the age, Cyril and Shirley, an unmarried working-class couple with left-wing sympathies, are taken to stand for a more decent set of caring and socially responsible _______.
Value
Unlike Valerie, whose beneficence towards her mother seems to have more to do with her own wants than those of Mrs. Bender, Cyril and ________ show genuine concern towards her and resolve, at the film’s end, to offer her more help in the future.
Shirley
Leigh’s universe is primarily that of _________ and his films generally deal with successes and failures of communication and connection within them.
At one point, Cyril argues that families ‘fuck you up’ and are ‘no use anymore’ and, as if to bear out his thesis, his own family is riven with conflicts and misunderstandings.
Families
If families are flawed, they seem, none the less, to be all that the characters have to hold on to, given that other forms of communality, extending beyond the family, are either inadequate or non-existent.
While Cyril hopes for a world in which everyone has ‘enough to eat’ and, on his visit to Highgate cemetery, praises _____ (‘Without _____ there wouldn’t have been nothing . . . There’d be no unions, no welfare state, no nationalised industries’), it turns out that he isn’t actually a member of a trade union himself and is dismissive of Suzi’s revolutionary politics.
Marx
While the film chides the lack of neighbourliness shown by the Booth-Baines towards Mrs. Bender, there is no evidence of any ‘community’ in the block of flats in which Cyril and Shirley live.
Indeed, the film’s final scene, in which Cyril and Shirley take Mrs. Bender up on the roof and look down on the ________ station where Cyril’s father used to work, has a strong sense of the passing of a traditional working-class culture, rooted in manual labour and a sense of place.
Railway
Cyril and Shirley would appear to lack any clear sense of connection or involvement with a more broadly based social or political community and tradition.
Cyril admits as much when he explains to Shirley how he feels ‘cut off’ and that he ‘don’t do nothing’ except ‘_________’.
Moaning
The way out of this dilemma (feeling ‘cut off’) for Cyril seems to be an acceptance of __________.
For most of the film he is against having a child, not only because ‘families fuck you up’ but because ‘no one gives a shit what sort of world . . . kids . . . born into’.
Fatherhood
By the end of the film Cyril is prepared to try, with Shirley, for a ______.
Baby
It is significant that all the couples in the film are childless.
In the case of the Gore-Booths and Burkes, this is associated with the ‘sterility’ of the values they represent.
The decision of Cyril and Shirley to have a child, therefore, invests the end of the film with a degree of ________ (“high hopes”) about the future.
Optimism
In High Hopes (1988) Mike Leigh evokes the social mood and ______ tensions of Thatcher’s London through the actions and interactions of his seven main characters - three couples and the ageing, isolated mother of the film’s main character, Cyril.
Class
The central, most sympathetic characters in the film are Cyril (Philip Davis) and Shirley (Ruth Sheen).
Shaggy-haired, left-wing, bohemian, and marginally linked to the working class, Cyril smokes pot, reads ______ for Beginners, and works at a dead-end job as a motorcycle messenger.
Lenin
An alien in Thatcher’s Britain, he is a man without interest in money and status, one who must angrily adjust to being treated as invisible by an impersonal, profit-obsessed society.
Cyril, choked with feelings of class resentment, still believes in _____ and his vision of society.
Marx
Although committed to social ________, he admits that he sits on his arse in despair because he just isn’t sure what to do politically.
Change
Leigh uses the snobbish couple who live next door to Cyril’s depressed, disconnected mother, Mrs. Bender (Edna Dore), as venomous comic characters to send up gentrification and Thatcherite social callousness.
The wife, ______ (Leslie Manvile), conveys the brittle, harsh inhumanity of a pint-sized
Laetita
