That's also how Mary (Lesley Manville) feels. She has worked for years in the office of Gerri, a behavioral counselor. Many people have a friend like Mary: unmarried, not getting any younger, drinking too much, looking for the perfect spouse as a way of holding any real-world relationship at arm's length. Mary drops in on Tom (Jim Broadbent) and Gerri (Ruth Sheen) a lot. Every time she visits, we're reminded of Robert Frost: Home is where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.
Mary needs healing. She badly requires sobriety. She wears an invisible sign around her neck: Needy.Tom and Gerri don't lecture. Sometimes they drop gentle hints. “It's a shame,” Tom observes to Gerri after Mary has ended yet another sad visit, and that's all he has to say. No criticisms, no anger, just a factual statement.
In their own lives, they're in complete accord. They garden, they work, they feed their friends dinners, they hope their son will find the right girl, they are in love. Remarkably, in this age, their 30-year-old son, Joe (Oliver Maltman), loves them and is happy.
Leigh has a gift for scenes involving embarrassment in social situations. We squirm, not because the characters are uneasy, but because we would be, too. Tom and Gerri and their son attend the funeral of Tom's sister-in-law. We have never been to a funeral quite like it, yet it is like many funerals. The uninvolved clergyman, the efficient undertakers, the remote father, the angry son, the handful of neighbors who didn't know the deceased all that well, the family skeletons. Leigh sees the ways people display their anguish without meaning to.
The movie doesn't require this scene. It has no obligatory scenes. Like life, it happens once you plug in the people. Mary lives in a very small world, where it's unlikely she'll find happiness. She buys a car to give her more “freedom,” but no one who drinks like she does will find freedom that way. She fantastically begins to think of their son, Joe, as a possible partner. Joe brings home Katie (Karina Fernandez) to meet his parents, and they love her. When Mary meets Katie and understands who she is, it is devastating.
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