Mike Leigh is 82, and he has said what most people around his new film have been thinking. Tender Loving Care, which premiered at Telluride on September 4 and is currently in Special Presentations at TIFF, is almost certainly the last film he will direct.
“The truth is I’m somewhat handicapped,” Leigh told Variety. He has myositis, a condition in which the immune system attacks the muscles. His capacity to stand on a set, to run the months-long improvisational rehearsal process that defines his work, has narrowed. “In terms of energy and ideas, it wouldn’t be a problem.” The body is the constraint. “Not doing it again is frustrating. But, like life, you move on.”
Tender Loving Care follows Amy (Kate O’Flynn) and Rosie (Alice Bailey Johnson), best friends and social workers navigating the slow collapse of Britain’s care system. When Amy’s father (Paul Jesson) begins to show signs of cognitive decline, the film turns inward. Marion Bailey plays her mother. The script is original, developed through Leigh’s signature rehearsal process, and the result is what critics have described as a quiet, precise, and quietly devastating portrait of how care gets distributed, or withheld, across a life.
The film holds a 100 percent on Rotten Tomatoes from its Telluride and TIFF run. The Film Stage called it “the apparent final work of Mike Leigh,” noting two consecutive scenes that feel like deliberate conclusions to a career. Awards Radar’s Joey Magidson described the final shot as “obliterating.”
Bleecker Street releases in the U.S. on December 4. StudioCanal handles the UK. The film will also screen in the Main Slate at the New York Film Festival.
Leigh said, “Making films is a joyous thing, a gas — I love it.” For the audience, the weight of Tender Loving Care is inseparable from that fact.
