The Best of British Cinema: Meantime (1983)
Mike Leigh’s drama captures unemployment under Thatcher perfectly
Meantime, Mike Leigh’s 1983 made-for-TV film, is one of the best examples of a film deserving of re-assessment and praise. It has, quite unfairly, been left in the dark. Until it was released by The Criterion Collection in 2017, the film was only reliably accessible cut into ten parts on YouTube. It was that YouTube version which introduced me to the film, and which cemented my love for Mike Leigh as a young film fan. This film changed how my fifteen year old self thought about film, but it also made me much more politically aware.
Meantime follows two brothers, Colin and Mark, and their family living in Thatcher’s Britain. The film is more character-driven than narratively focused, but this is entirely intentional — many of Mike Leigh’s films are this way. Meantime, as its title suggests, spends much of its time meandering, waiting for something to happen. This isn’t to say that the film is slow or boring, it’s far from it, just that its narrative is intentionally bare and minimal.
The film generally flows in circles. The characters don’t experience any real change from beginning to end, they all remain stuck in the same, far too familiar situations. Andrew Dickson’s score is repetitive and one-note, again not…
