
courtesy of the Criterion Collection
We meet some family friends. David Thewlis is Nicola's secret lover, who drops by the house for a round of kinky sex that suggests the depth of Nicola's emotional pain. Timothy Spall plays an eccentric acquaintance who convinces Wendy to wait tables at his new, entirely doomed restaurant. (The menu features all those internal organs and meat byproducts associated with British cuisine.)
If the film has a central story (and it really doesn't), it would be Andy's decision to purchase a dilapidated food truck from his shady friend Patsy (Steven Rea). The junked-out van becomes a visual metaphor for the family. It's pretty beaten up, but it still functions. It leans but never topples. It's homey.
Life is Sweet is often touching, often funny, and it maintains a most delicate surface tension. Some of the characters are so eccentric that they would become grotesques in the hands of a less careful ensemble. I'm thinking of Spall's character in particular. But the director and performers are so clearly locked in with one another that each scene, each beat, feels organic and authentic. When the film's big dramatic scenes roll around, they percolate up naturally.
The film's biggest problem isn't the film's problem at all: It's that, on this side of the pond, the thick working-class U.K. dialects can be extremely difficult to decipher. This is where closed captioning comes in handy. Criterion has long resisted putting a direct menu option for closed captioning on their DVD and Blu-ray titles, for reasons I still don't understand. But all English-language titles now have an encoded SDH track (subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing). You have manually activate the closed captions with your remote control or the buttons on your Blu-ray player. On the Playstation 3, hit the Triangle button to access the captioning options.
Also New This Week:
Snitch stars Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson as a desperate father who agrees to infiltrate a drug cartel when his teen son is sentenced to 20 years in prison. This is Johnson's bid for respectability as a dramatic actor, and it halfway works, but he's really the wrong guy for the Suburban Dad role.
Jeremy Renner and Gemma Arterton square off against the powers of darkness in Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters.
Aaron Sorkin's intriguing HBO series — a peek behind the scenes of a fictional cable TV news network — is now available for binge-watching with The Newsroom: The Complete First Season.
The first season of the Netflix original series House of Cards, starring Kevin Spacey, has been issued to DVD and Blu-ray.
The Korean thriller The Taste of Money concerns the corrupting effect of wealth on an aristocratic Seoul family.
The History channel's After People collection combines four end-of-the-world themed documentary specials into one oddly compelling package. If you like apocalypse stories and scenarios, you'll like this.
Plus: Betty & Coretta, Dead Man's Burden, Fred Won't Move Out, Knife Fight, The Life and Times of Allen Ginsberg and Vivan Las Antipodas.