EVERYDAY

(Michael Winterbottom, 2012)

A lovely study of the quotidian stresses and agonies of a family separated by the imprisonment of the husband and father (John Simm), Everyday is moving and beautifully observed.
Director Michael Winterbottom has long had the rare ability to combine an almost verite sense of the real world - a sometimes drab place, without glamour or artifice, filled with normal people living casually uneventful lives - with an eye for the fleeting poetry of the now, for the beauty in a dull room barely lit through a smeared window, or the splash of energy on a city street, and that is powerfully in evidence here.
Winterbottom shot Everyday at intervals over a five year period, and Simm and Shirley Henderson (as his wife, struggling with raising their four children alone) are surrounded by non-professionals, and indeed, part of the unique joy of the film is watching the four children grow up over the course of the story. That sense of the passage of time, so often a phoney construction in cinema, here has the sting of reality visible in the maturing faces of its actors.
This is essentially a love story rooted in the routines and grind of family life, with the father notable mainly by his absence, and it is given a sort of intimate epic quality by the majestic landscapes of Norfolk where the family live and by an expansive, emotive Michael Nyman score. Scene after scene follows Henderson and her children engaged in the banalities of regular family life - getting up in the morning, commuting to work and school, bedtime, dinner, sunny days at the beach, supermarket shopping, and watching television. The tiny dramas of life - children staying out too late, fights in the schoolyard, a troubling flirtation from a friend which becomes an affair - are just part of the tapestry, of one thing after another, day after day after day. That is all given an added dimension in contrast with what we see of Simm's life in prison: the dull colours and harsh lighting, the extreme repetition and unbending routine, the small spaces and petty humiliations. These two worlds clash a few times - the family visit their father in prison, and he gets a couple of day release passes. Winterbottom brilliantly punctuates these sequences with the flat reality of the penal life Simm must return to afterward, and this repetitive structure takes on its own rhythm, formed from repeated shots and events - characters travelling on buses and trains and in cabs, Henderson awakening at the rude trill of an alarm clock, the fields around their house.
This film asks how can a family survive such a separation, and more piercingly, how a couple can remain in love without the traditional structures of family life to support them. This love story is odd and difficult but also tremendously moving. A couple of halting, beautiful love scenes are echoed by repeated shots of this man and woman clinging to one another, and walking surrounded by their children. In Everyday, that is a great happiness, the continued survival of the family a triumph of sorts over the world itself.

WONDERLAND

(Michael Winterbottom, 1999)

Two Views of London dominate cinematic portrayals of the City. There is the Touristic fairytale familiar from a dozen romantic comedies, all Big Ben, black cabs, red buses, jobs in Canary Wharf and mews houses. Then there is the seedy underbelly, familiar from the crime genre (warehouses, East End gangster boozers) and social realist portrayals of poverty (tower blocks, crack houses). The middle ground, the commuter suburbs, the lower middle class millions in terraced houses in unremarkable areas, riding the tube and buses to work, shopping in retail parks and watching satellite television, they have been under-represented in modern cinema. Mike Leigh has addressed this territory, in Another Year and Secrets and Lies, but Michael Winterbottom's Wonderland is perhaps the definitive film of this other, real London.
Loosely circling three sisters and their network of friends, family and lovers, Winterbottom's film is largely shot handheld, allowing for a couple of stunningly spontaneous captures of moments in the metropolis; the most obvious being a long shot following a sister as she flees a bad blind date in a pub through a crowded, lairy West End. This is London as it really is, by turns beautiful, bleak, exciting, ugly and exhilarating, but always teeming with vitality and life. Something of the unknowable immensity of the place is communicated too, through the variety of experiences Winterbottom portrays, from neat lives in middle-class suburbia, council estates filled with quiet desperation, urbanite hipsters on the singles scene, tourists in a posh hotel and the loneliness of young commuters, working in service industries and retail jobs in Central London. The writing is acute, and together with some moving performances, it helps the film capture many of these people in recognisable slices of experience. The cast is superb and based on some proven British talent, from Gina McKee and John Simm to Shirley Henderson and Ian Hart.
One of Winterbottom's greatest gifts as a director is an ability to capture moments of fleeting beauty within his loose, energetic style. The verisimilitude never oppresses his sensual appeal, and here is an object lesson: never have some ugly parts of London looked so lovely, and the atmosphere is vivid and effortlessly rendered. The visual style is matched to memorable effect by Michael Nyman's haunting and uplifting soundtrack, a symphony for London itself.