The period between the end of one act and the beginning of another is called the meantime, a dull and aching stretch of patience and irritation.
The meantime is where the Pollock family lives, in the company of three million other unemployed Brits under 1980’s Thatcherism, while they scrape by and grow restless.
There is a defining moment in Mike Leigh’s Meantime (1983) where Mavis Pollock (Pam Ferris), mother of two pitiful sons and wife to cynical Frank (Jeffrey Robert), is seated in front of a bingo card crowded by a sea of sweatered women, pens at the ready to circle each subsequent number. Inside the haze of the bingo hall, stuffy with anticipation, Mavis’ pen loses ink. Panicked, she finds another as quick as one can while the numbers slip by. Finally, three pens are attempted with no luck as a woman off screen yells “bingo.” Nothing, including her self-esteem, is functioning. It is there, across Mavis’ face: the mechanics of how one loses hope and surrenders oneself to tragedy.
Every character’s face molds similarly at some point during the film, a powerlessness of each individual exposed. If not in such shape, they are in perpetual scornful glares, darting around for any or everything to release them of pent-up resentment, looking for something new to blame.
Leigh is sensitive to the small and large aggressions with which one roars their angst. Brothers Mark (Phil Daniels), a delinquent smart-mouth, and Colin (Tim Roth), a hopeless neurotic, navigate the economic degradation that keeps them in lines of unemployment offices the best they know how: drinking and smoking days away, looking for trouble around London’s East End. With a racist skinhead (Gary Oldman) on the edge of lunacy, they loiter in bars and around construction sites. Meanwhile at home, their mother and father are equally jobless, swearing and yelling in a symphony around the flat. Money is the objective and nothing is satisfying about the means they hope to achieve it with, not the brooding nor the begging.
The film is loose in structure, with no definite beginning, middle, or end, allowing one to enter the family’s lives as a participant, not a bystander. The cinematography is almost entirely loyal to brown, washing the screen with a miserable glow. The score is composed of only a frantic single piano weighing scenes down with minor chords and tension.
What truly shapes the film, however, is a dialogue untethered to momentum, only to a cause: an increasing atomization and disaffection of the working class.
By the end of Leigh’s Meantime, little has changed, most remains, and the stagnant fury carries on.
Until the meantime passes, this is how they must weather the economic storm.