In what looked to me the most meaningful moment in a film that has certainly many and more obvious, a wasted Marion Bailey crosses the yard of the decayed housing estate she lives in, probably headed for some more booze at the local off license. On her wobbly way, she bumps into a very young James Corden who’s juggling solo with a football. ‘You are on your own, aren’t you?’ she asks. ‘So?’ says he genuinely baffled, for once not trying to be confrontational.
Delving into more than a few important themes, All or Nothing is at heart, and probably more than any of Mike Leigh’s films, about loneliness—that of a cab driver who spends his life with strangers and ironically bonds with the one client least expected to be sympathetic, that of a pregnant girl abandoned by her boyfriend, that of all of them, and us, who ‘live as we dream,’ recalling a famous quote from Heart of Darkness, ‘alone.’ But it’s also about support in the mutual recognition of our inescapable existential state—about having each other, ‘or we have nothing,’ as Timothy Spall says in a most touching pas de deux with Lesley Manville.
Mike Leigh’s reflective journey into the dismal and the unfair is far from being the gloomy exercise in pessimism that some had superficially decided to have seen—it is rather a profoundly absurdist and passionate take on life in its exciting and bloody fullness.