Caretaking is a sacrifice; social work a form of semi-self-sabotage – all in the name of helping someone else. Whether these selfless acts come from familial obligations, a loving partnership,  or a sense of duty to your community, the outcomes are usually similar. There are repercussions to your social life, the rewarding feeling of bettering others’ lives, and the finality of accepting the failure of your services. So why do we perform these rituals of tender loving care? It’s a question Mike Leigh has been quietly answering for decades. In his latest, and possibly last, film, Tender Loving Care, Leigh argues these very acts of TLC aren’t simply the maintenance of a failing machine, but the fuel that makes it run in the first place. 

The invisible measures that make up the minutiae of life aren’t its symptoms, side effects, or accepted bargains, but life itself. Without love and care, there isn’t life; and yet, even with it, there still won’t be life in the end. It’s a simultaneously heartwarming yet nihilistic vantage point that courses through the veins of many of Leigh’s films. Tender Loving Care feels like a final reckoning of a life’s worth of work – both emotionally and within his filmography.

At the beating heart of Tender Loving Care is a quartet of characters, featuring two duos who mirror each other to show the myriad ways humans rely on one another to survive. Breakout actress Kate O’Flynn, fresh off the haunted boat of Widow’s Bay, now riding the high tides of her recent Emmy win, stars as Amy, where her quirky loveability is once again on full display. After a serious split with her partner, Amy rooms with her best friend Rosie (Alice Bailey Johnson), both social workers in London who blow off the steam of their stressful jobs with a hefty glass of white wine. Birdie (Marion Bailey) and Geoff (Paul Jesson), Amy’s aging parents, live a slower, quieter life. Rather than wine, the spouses share tea. Instead of bad dates and breakups, their social life involves trips to the grocery store and funerals.

Leigh pairs these two relationships as the oscillating narrative crux of Tender Loving Care. They act as both a mirror and window into their lives. On the surface, they move at vastly different paces, come from different income brackets, and care about contrasting matters of life. But with a deeper gaze, Leigh helps us see the similarities in their love. His decades-long career capturing life’s small, interpersonal moments shows up in the poignancy of the silly antics Birdie and Geoff privately share, or the raucous riffs Amy and Rosie share.

The film saunters about in this grey space for a while, following the four characters. Just when you think maybe nothing significant will happen in Tender Loving Care, it hits you with a quiet, slow failing of the senses. Geoff’s memory, sanity, and usual personable demeanor begin to slip from Birdie’s hands.

It doesn’t happen suddenly or rapidly. Instead, the idea of Geoff’s passing lingers about the second half of the film, leaving a sense of paranoia and anxiety as you anticipate the worst and brace for the final blow. But fans of Leigh know by now, he moves more artfully than that. Leigh’s fingers lightly slide and pluck upon the marionettes of these lives, thoughtfully crafting the moments when one small adjustment releases ripples of emotion. It’s an intangible signature skill of Leigh’s storytelling that will undoubtedly be mourned, if this is indeed his final film.

For all the slow, lightweight, almost documentary-like scenes Leigh captures at the beginning of Tender Loving Care, the dense, powerful moments toward the end give it so much emotional weight. The three women visit Geoff in his bedroom, caring for him, showing him love, and when words fail, they sing – one of the film’s most touching scenes. As Geoff struggles to find the words to communicate his feelings to Birdie, Amy, and Rosie, his mind keeps returning to the same word: “swans.” 

At first, the word comes as a shock, as a nonsensical answer to a simple question. Later, it becomes a touching reprise — something he has held onto as a memory of love in his life. If Tender Loving Care is Leigh’s swan song, it’s a fitting mantra – it feels like a reminder of the gifts he has given us through his films.

While these intimate moments between the four main characters carry the film, Leigh reserves one more character to really deliver the gut punch of emotion that viewers should know he’s always secretly packing. This character opens and ends the film and remains nameless. Is he a stand-in for Leigh himself? Or does he represent all those deprived of tender, loving care? One of Rosie’s many patients in her social work, the gruff, homeless man begins the film with incessant ramblings in a hospital bed. “I should have strangled him,” he mumbles. After he flees from the hospital, he simply becomes another of Rosie’s end-of-day grievances over wine with Amy. We all but forget about him until the last shot of the film.

The unnamed man, played by Alan Williams, becomes a stark reminder that, despite the hard work we put into caring for one another, when it all seems too difficult, there is someone out there who never got to care for anyone, was never cared for, and will never know this type of love. Or they knew it once and lost it. It might only be a coincidence that this man resembles Mike Leigh. Or it might be his last gruff wink-and-nod to a career of intimate, complex stories of humanity that are naked, don’t shy away from hard truths, expose secrets and lies, and most of all, are made with tender, loving care.

Review Courtesy of Kasey Dunifer

Feature Image Credit to Thin Man Films and Bleecker Street