1996 – Secrets and Lies

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Secrets and Lies – 1996

This was an average movie right up until the climax.  Then it got really messed up.  The movie is about a family in England that is plagued by, you guessed it, secrets and lies.  The main thrust of the plot follows a young, well-educated black woman who, after the death of her adopted mother, decides to search for her birth mother.  But when she finds the woman, she gets a lot more than she bargained for.

Marianne Jean-Baptiste plays Hortense Cumberbatch.  She was really the stand-out actress in the cast.  She did such a good job she was recognized with a nomination for a Best Supporting Actress Oscar.  She was beautiful and had an emotional depth to her that was sincere and undeniable.  As she learns of her birth mother Cynthia Purley, played by Brenda Blethyn, who was nominated for Best Actress for her part, Hortense goes through fear, excitement, and everything in between.  But Cynthia is a complete mess of a character.  She is uneducated, an emotional wreck, spends most of her time in a manic, tearful state, and is white.  When the two finally meet and their vastly different worlds collide, the extreme awkwardness is palpable.

But the movie spends just as much time following the other members of Cynthia’s family.  We follow her relationship with her other daughter Roxanne, played by Claire Rushbrook.  We also follow the story of her somewhat estranged brother Maurice, played by Timothy Spall and his wife Monica, played by Phyllis Logan.  Roxanne is a sour young woman who seems to be angry at the life she was born into, for which she blames her mother.  Maurice is a good and hard-working man who loves his wife, sister, and niece dearly.  But he and Monica have problems that are threatening to end the marriage.

The plot is fairly average with a lot of set-up and character development, which isn’t a bad thing, though it does make for a slow paced film.  But as I said, the climax really tries its best to make up for it.  Maurice and Monica host a birthday party for Roxanne.  Cynthia, having finally been comfortably reconciled to Hortense, invites her to the party, claiming that she is a friend from work.  While at the celebration, she has an emotional breakdown and tells everyone the true nature of her relationship with the girl.  The entire gathering blows up into a flood of confessions, accusations, and tears.

The scene was so well planned out and perfectly executed.  By the end of the sequence, there doesn’t seem to be a dry eye in the room.  Blethyn and Jean-Baptiste really played their parts well.  Blethyn seemed to carry the bulk of the emotional weight of the scene and she did it by staying true to the unstable character of Cynthia.  Jean Baptiste’s emotional power seemed to dominate the first half of the film.  Both women were very well-cast.

Even Spall got his momentary emotional outburst that caught me off guard.  When Cynthia cruelly lashes out at Monica for not performing her wifely duty to give her husband children, Monica breaks down into hysterical sobbing.  The ever calm and rational Maurice stands up to defend his wife by confessing her shameful secret.  Yelling at his sister, he tells her that Monica is not able to have children.  I’m not exactly sure why that secret was treated as such a source of shame for Monica, though I can understand the intensity of her pain and anger.  Maurice shouts that the three people he loves the most all seem to hate each other, and he feels caught in the middle of them.

I already liked his character but what he did next made my like him even more.  As the family has their meltdown, Hortense can only sit quietly in the background.  She is horrified to be the unwitting catalyst which started all the trouble.  But when the shouting is all over and the tears begin to subside, he makes a point of welcoming the black stranger, the elephant in the room, to the family.  Bless you Maurice.

Now, I feel I have to make special mention of the dialogue, which was all spoken with a heavy British accent.  It wasn’t the high and proper English accent you might hear in a Merchant-Ivory period drama, nor was it a thick cockney accent reminiscent of My Fair Lady.  It was a modern middle-class accent that was, at times, difficult to understand.  But it was appropriate and went a long way to enhance both the realism and believability of the film and its drama.

I was also rather impressed to learn that the film’s dialogue was almost completely unscripted.  The director, Mike Leigh, made the inspired choice to tell his exceptional cast of actors about what was supposed to happen in a scene, and then let them improvise their lines and create their own characters.  With less-skilled actors, the film could so easily have been a disaster, but it worked, and worked beautifully.  To paraphrase Wikipedia, “The emotional scene in the diner, in which Cynthia realizes that she is indeed Hortense’s mother, Brenda Blethyn was not told beforehand that Hortense was black, making her reaction more authentic.”  How very true.