Another (unappreciated?) Mike Leigh film and a baseball documentary

Yet more evidence that Mike Leigh is an unappreciated film writer and director: his 1983 movie Meantime, which I for one knew little about (thanks, Criterion, for making this and other Leigh films available this month!) but seems to me a domestic drama of the highest order – would have played well on stage, too, I think – that perfectly captures the angst of its time and place: the dreary “council housing” on the outskirts of London in the ‘80s, a time of massive unemployment, distrust of government, the rise of skinhead violence. He centers the movie on a family of four, the ever-grumbling unemployed father, the constantly haranguing mother always about to explode with anger, and the two 20-something sons, living at home, sharing a tiny bedroom, one of whom (Colin – played by Tim Roth, who steals the show with his understated performance) w/ serious retardation. The film is much darker than any other Leigh film I’ve seen, with the unrelenting bickering and screaming making it for some a piece of difficult viewing; but there’s a subtle sweetness that binds the two brothers as they, to a degree, put up a united front against family pressures, particularly from those of the officious aunt, a small step above the rest of the family in her marriage to a guy with an office job (and troubles of his own, of course), who tries to hire Colin to do some work at her apartment at an insultingly low wage rate. (Helps both of us, dunnit?, as she might have said). Should rank up there w/ some great British films of the 50s such as Loneliness of the Long-Distrance Runner as thoughtful and fearless accounts of working-class struggles during times of economic distress. The unusual score – harpsichord and, I think, oboe – is terrific in signifying the dissolves from one “scene” to the next.

 

Also last night finished watching the 2014 documentary The Battered Bastards of Baseball, by MacLain and Chapman Way, account of the 1970s independent (i.e., not associated w/ any Major League club) minor-league team, the Portland Mavericks. The team was put together by actor Bing Russell (who was apparently extremely knowledgeable about the sport), after a lackluster Class AAA minors team moved out of the city. He filled the team, it seems, through open tryouts and basically took a bunch of players passed over, for one reason or another, by all the Major League franchises. The team performed surprisingly well on the field for its, I think, 4 seasons, and did extremely well at the gate, generating enthusiasm and national sports coverage before folding and making way for AAA franchise (part of the Mariners system, I think). The doc has its moments, but its problems as well. First of all there way too much of the material is narrated by talking heads – unfortunate, but maybe necessary as there is so little good archival footage. Second, the film never really explains how the franchise was so successful on the field – how could a team of undrafted players do so well? Were these guys older and more mature than the Class A competition? Today, I think this kind of success would be impossible, as the draft is so much more sophisticated and scouting so much more thorough that it was in the 1970s. What’s undisputed is the success at the gate, but that may have more to do w/ the incompetence of the previous Portland franchise; surely, a city the size of Portland, Oregon, is large enough to support a minor-league team, and the surprise is not so much the success of this franchise as the failure of its predecessor.