8 - Inhabiting Otherness: Grown-Ups

Summary

One of the misguided criticisms of my work is that I patronize working-class characters. Now this is basically rubbish. Not true at all. What I actually do is put on the screen very accurate depictions of working-class people. And that is what you do not normally get on the screen. And because of that, when it's seen from the perspective of non-ordinary, non-middle-class characters it seems to be a statement about class tensions when it often isn't. It's just that that's who they are, basically. … There's an enormous Anglophile population [in the United States], and they import all sorts of British television, but it's all the mythical British. As in Masterpiece Theater, it's not real.

–Mike Leigh

As we have seen, one of Leigh's basic narrative devices to test his characters and reveal their limitations is to pair them with antitypes. In Grown-Ups, Dick and Mandy are precisely the kind of students who give migraines to teachers like Ralph and Christine Butcher. And Gloria, in turn, exists to disrupt first Dick and Mandy's own small purchase on order and subsequently Ralph and Christine's. The meeting of matter and antimatter almost always generates farce, but what makes a Leigh film different from an Ealing picture is that the comedy is also serious. The comical outer events are vehicles for serious inner reassessments and revelations. The physical uproar leads to genuine emotional upheaval.