Someone once said, “Mike Leigh doesn’t make bad movies.” I repeated this in the days leading up to the premiere of his latest at TIFF and his acceptance of the Ebert Director Award (more on that lovely event soon). But the truth is that the same could be said about Pedro Almodóvar, who has taken the most recent decade of his career to remind us that he is a singular talent, one of the very best. His latest just won the Golden Lion at Venice, and it’s marvelous. In his first feature-length film in the English language, he loses none of his dramatic power, directing his stars to some of the best work of their luminous careers and telling a story of incredible emotional truth.
“The Room Next Door” is about many things, but I took away two powerfully interconnected messages, beautifully rendered through Almodovar’s inimitable melodramatic voice. The first is that, sometimes, nothing is more important than being present for someone else. When cancer patient Matilda (Tilda Swinton, giving a top-five career performance) asks old friend Ingrid (Julianne Moore) to accompany her on a trip from which she plans not to return, she gives the film its title, insisting that she doesn’t need assistance, just companionship. Through this often-dark thing called life, it’s nice to know someone loves us in the room next door. This theme is threaded through a flashback about the father of Matilda’s estranged daughter—a man who felt he had no one next door—and Matilda’s difficult profession, which demands immediacy and support.
Two, there is beauty in every moment on this earth if you look for it. The film quotes James Joyce’s “The Dead” more than once: “… the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.” Everything lives and dies, and the snow keeps falling. This remarkably moving thematic undercurrent gets a glorious counter in an old lover of Matilda and Ingrid’s, played perfectly by John Turturro. He’s reached such a cynical point with the world that he can’t understand how anyone brings more children into it. His despair for mankind is understandable, but he only sees darkness, while the woman actively planning to leave the planet sees the beauty of the falling snow.
There’s so much to unpack in “The Room Next Door,” but it’s also just so distinctly a Pedro film in terms of craft. Costume designer Bina Daigeler (Oscar-nominated for “Mulan”) leans into Almodovar’s style—this may be a U.S.-set film, but he didn’t leave his vibrant color palette in Spain. Even the AirBnB that Ingrid and Matilda rent feels possible only in an Almodóvar film. The heightened melodrama in all of his work has also been translated in a manner that’s irked some critics who claim the dialogue doesn’t sound natural—I would counter by saying the same is true of his Spanish films. Almodóvar makes movies that don’t disguise their artifice—they lean into it and use it to break your heart apart.
It’s funny that the latest work from another of our greatest living filmmakers at TIFF this year is from a director who consciously avoids artifice. Mike Leigh’s “Hard Truths” is a return to present-day storytelling (after “Mr. Turner” and “Peterloo”) for the wildly talented writer/director, reuniting him with his “Secrets and Lies” star Marianne Jean-Baptiste in a story of a woman who has been so bruised by life that she knows little more than how to bruise others. What first feels like a Leigh variation on “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” with its very funny, deeply misanthropic protagonist, becomes something much darker when “Hard Truths” pivots into a study of trauma, grief, and realizing that you’ve possibly made too many bad choices to escape the life you hate. I’m not sure the finale lands like the best of Leigh, but Jean-Baptiste is breathtakingly good, and it’s so nice to have Leigh back on the dramatic scene. He’s essential to it.
Jean-Baptiste plays Pansy, wife to Curtley (David Webber) and father to Moses (Tuwaine Barrett). She openly resents her family, channeling her rage about a husband she clearly no longer loves (if she ever did) and an adult son with no ambition into obsessive cleanliness, which borders on mental illness. Her home is disturbingly sterile, balanced against that of her sister (Michele Austin), whose residence is vibrant with color and life. Leigh’s filmmaking style is so unique; his skill with subtle visual counters and themes has long been underrated. (It helps to have the great Dick Pope as a D.P. again, of course.)
For the first half of “Hard Truths,” Pansy is a tornado of Karen-esque encounters as Pansy unrealistically yells at salespeople, cashiers, and anyone else who dares look at her wrong. It’s almost a counter to Leigh’s masterful “Happy-Go-Lucky”—call this one “Angry-Go-Lucky”—but then the curtain drops when Pansy’s sister insists they visit Mom’s grave on Mother’s Day. The following scenes allow Jean-Baptiste to dig into a deep emotional well that goes surprisingly unexpressed. This is a woman who won’t stop talking when she’s mad but cannot find the words to express her sadness. Pansy is a pretty awful human being to strangers and her family. Still, Leigh and Jean-Baptiste struggle to find compassion for someone with so much emotional baggage that all that can escape the weight of it all is anger.
I understand the intent of the relatively vague ending—it’s no spoiler to say that Leigh is uninterested in a tidy emotional wrap-up—but I still don’t think it quite lands like the best of his films. However, that feeling could change on repeat viewing—the man’s works often reveal more the second and even third times around. And the streak continues; after all, Mike Leigh doesn’t make bad movies.
