TENDER LOVING CARE Trailer: Mike Leigh’s Final Film is a Moving Drama on the Bonds that Matter
After a prolific career that lasted decades, Mike Leigh returns with a new, loving family drama that is likely to be his last feature film. His sixteenth feature, Tender Loving Care, stars recent Emmy winner Kate O’Flynn (Widow’s Bay), alongside Leigh’s longtime partner Marion Bailey, Paul Jesson, and Alice Bailey Johnson. Following a fall festival tour, which included Telluride, TIFF, and NYFF, Bleecker Street will release the compassionate family drama in NY and LA on December 11, before expanding nationwide on Christmas Day.
Here’s the official synopsis from NYFF:
One of our most steadfast, unflinching chroniclers of the human condition, Mike Leigh has now crafted, along with a customarily brilliant ensemble, a portrayal of overwhelmed, resilient lives in post-Brexit England that should be received as one of his signature works. At its center is Amy (Kate O’Flynn), a government child protection worker who, after a failed relationship, has moved back in with her chipper best friend, Rosie (Alice Bailey Johnson), whose job as a social services officer is a daily confrontation with anger and resentment. Meanwhile, Amy’s aging parents (Marion Bailey and Paul Jesson), concerned with their daughter’s happiness, suddenly have to contend with a crisis of their own. Smiling through their struggles—with or without a trusty bottle of wine—these finely drawn characters, and all of the remarkable supporting characters with whom they come into contact, speak volumes about the U.K.’s underfunded and fragmented care sector. Avoiding didacticism and maintaining a leveling sense of humor, Leigh shows, with clear-eyed compassion, the difficulty of asking for—and accepting—help in a world that continually lets us down.
See the trailer and poster below.
