Life Is Sweet

Mike Leigh's Life Is Sweet (1990) brought the British director sustained international recognition, winning a clutch of American critics' prizes and setting the warm but unflinching tragicomic mode he would go on refining for decades. Developed, like all his films, through extensive improvisation with the cast, it is among the most affectionate things he has made.

Alison Steadman and Jim Broadbent play the cheerfully coping parents. Jane Horrocks, in a celebrated performance, is the bulimic, self-lacerating daughter Nicola, and Timothy Spall a deluded restaurateur. Leigh watches the small comedy of suburban English life (dodgy business ventures, awkward dinners, sibling friction) with great tenderness, and never looks away from the distress underneath it. His achievement here is to hold broad humour and real pain in the same frame without any visible strain, so that a laugh and a wince often arrive in the same moment.

Critics embraced its humanity and its performances, and it is still a touchstone of British social comedy. Funny and generous, and heartbreaking without ever raising its voice, Life Is Sweet finds a great deal in an ordinary family and treats its characters with a compassion that never tips into sentimentality. Horrocks's Nicola became justly famous. The film laid down the template Leigh would follow through his later successes, and it remains one of the warmest and most humane films in modern British cinema.