Secrets and Lies

(MGM Home Entertainment, 2.1.2005)

You know you're in for it when the opening shot is of a funeral procession moving through a cemetery, dour stone looming in the frame, the score melancholy...it's a Serious Drama. Mike Leigh's Secrets and Lies certainly does put you through the wringer but, like many of his other films, its intensity is incredibly cathartic and undeniably compelling. Leigh's preoccupation with class, race, and the weight of familial expectations (and history) sometimes take precedence over characterization but at least he's aiming at something other than simple comic caricature.

If anything, Secrets and Lies is a master class in great acting, starting with Brenda Blethyn as a fragile, chainsmoking, working-class English mum suddenly confronted by a black daughter (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), the end result of a long-ago one-night stand given up years prior for adoption. Buckling under the weight of his sister's neuroses and a wobbling marriage is Timothy Spall, a family photographer embodying the notion of "enduring the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune." Heightened, Shakespearean drama is indeed the name of the game here but the performances are authentically felt and the cast's extraordinary interaction in the film's big confrontational scenes is stunning.

Leigh's oft-lauded working process with his actors -- involving months of rehearsal and refinement of the roles -- still remains at the service of his politics and the remarkably clinical quality of his observations. Secrets and Lies' main weakness is, in fact, the "secret" hidden from the audience until the climax (spoilers ahead). Leigh treats a wife's inability to conceive as being almost as shameful as another woman's checkered sexual history and this revelation does leave a bit of a sour taste, despite a cautiously cheerful coda that sends each character out with a note of hope.

Fox's budget-line DVD can be found for $10 or less and, aside from a small handful of trailers, all you get is the film, served up in a surprisingly crisp and colorful anamporphic transfer (1.85:1). One wishes for more goodies from Fox, in the manner of its recent release of Wim Wenders' Paris, Texas, but the film at hand speaks well for itself. It's an empathetic and humanistic drama that does not look away when the going gets tough. It's worth noting, however, that in the opening funeral sequence, the weather is sunny and bright. -- Jason Comerford