Mike Leigh comes back from his change of pace and change of scene in Topsy-Turvy, back to his normal pace and his old stomping ground, a working-class milieu in modern-day London, more exactly a utilitarian housing complex and three downtrodden families therein. He gives us (among other things) over a dozen vividly drawn characters, of varying degrees of grotesquerie and gruesomeness without ever losing their touch with reality, each one fully fleshed out from top to toe. And he gives the pivotal female role to Lesley Manville, a Leigh regular who tends to get lost in the shuffle, but who asserts herself here as one of the great actresses of the English-speaking world. (Meryl Streep great, Judy Davis great, Tracey Ullman great.) A tiny sparrow of a woman next to the overfed pigeons of her mate and offspring, a twenty-four-hour-a-day worrywart, a doormat who ought to wear a sign around her neck, "Tread on me," she has all of the armor-piercing, heart-skewering pathos of a D.W. Griffith heroine and none of the drummed-up melodrama. A Lillian Gish, a Carol Dempster, as photographed by a Lewis Hine, a Dorothea Lange. Her picture could be put in Webster's beside the word woe. And yet she is almost matched by Ruth Sheen as the single mum, and free-lance laundress, who alone among the principal characters maintains a glimmer of warmth, a twinkle of humor, without a jot of encouragement or reciprocation, the neighborhood's leading candidate for canonization. To fully appreciate how great these two performances are, how completely the performers inhabit their roles, you'd need to have seen these same actresses in the same filmmaker's High Hopes -- provided, that is, you could recognize them in it. Timothy Spall, Alison Garland, James Corden, Marion Bailey, Sally Hawkins, Helen Coker. (2002) — Duncan Shepherd