All Or Nothing
Opportunity Costs
The principle of opportunity costs is simple. Part of the cost for everything you do is the missed opportunities for the things that you don’t do. If you go fishing this weekend, you lose the chance to go hiking. If you go to Florida on vacation, you lose the chance to go to California instead. Go out to a Mexican restaurant, and you shouldn’t expect to be able to order sesame chicken. Everything you do includes the loss of an opportunity for something else you might want to do.
I say this for a reason. If you want to see All Or Nothing, think about what it is you’re giving up. Two hours of watching this tiring, depressing, horrible movie is two hours you will never get back again, two hours that you could spend cooking a new dish or walking in the park or cuddling with your significant other or watching a baseball game. You could read a good book, volunteer to help the homeless, give blood, or do any number of good and necessary and useful things other than watch this desperately useless and appalling film.
All Or Nothing is about a group of lower-class families in a bleak tract of worker housing somewhere in London. The characters range from the mildly uninteresting to the mindlessly brutal to the completely dull. They work in crummy jobs, they gripe and complain and curse at each other constantly, they drink too much, they abuse one another endlessly. Not your basic recipe for a fun night out at the movies, this is.
There are three dysfunctional families in All Or Nothing, with various degrees of focus. Ron (Paul Jesson) is a recklessly incompetent cabdriver, his wife Carol (Marion Bailey) is drunker than General Grant, and their daughter Samantha (Sally Hawkins) is a tart. Next door is Maureen (Ruth Sheen), who takes in laundry, and is the best thing about the movie just by being intermittenly perky. Her daughter is Donna (Helen Coker), another tart, having a bad spot in her relationship with local bad boy Jason (Daniel Mays). Downstairs live Phil (Timothy Spall, Vanilla Sky, Rock Star) and Penny (Lesley Manville); Phil also drives a cab, and Penny works at the local grocery store. Phil mumbles a lot, and Penny complains a lot, and that’s all you need to know about them. Their daughter Rachel (Alison Garland) is not a tramp, she’s a big inchoate blob who works at a nursing home. Their son Rory (James Corden) is a blob, too, a huge grunting layabout who shuttles from dinner table to couch, cursing back and forth.
To be fair, these are not the kinds of characters we normally see in movies. But director Mike Leigh doesn’t deserve any kudoes for putting these particular characters on the screen. The lives of these characters are so stunted, so narrow, so crude that putting them in a movie is one step short of cruel. Worse than that, they’re boring, and asking a perfectly nice movie audience to spend two hours with a lot of tacky, rude, and depressing characters in a boring, pointless movie is cruel, no two ways about it.
The real problem with the characters in All Or Nothing is that they have no opportunities left to them; no skills or education to fall back on, no experience to guide them in handling the situations that they find themselves in. There’s simply no way they can change their circumstances — ungrateful children, layabout spouses, abusive boyfriends, wretched working conditions — by themselves, they don’t have the tools for that. They’re all doomed; the only question is which circle of hell they will end up at, and whether or not they’ll drag the audience down with them.
I suppose I should be kinder to All Or Nothing. For one thing, the acting is superb. The actors are completely convincing in their roles; you always feel as though you’re around a pack of dull, pathetic jerks. And the movie has gotten its share of critical raves from those who find its melancholy appealing in some ways. But, still, I found All Or Nothing to be dull and oppressive and uninteresting and little more. Take whatever opportunity you have to see something else.