‘Tender Loving Care’ Review: Kate O’Flynn’s Social Worker Is Mike Leigh’s Real Subject

There is a woman at the center of Mike Leigh’s new film who spends her days managing other people’s emergencies and her evenings insisting she is fine. Kate O’Flynn plays her, and long before the picture reveals what it is about, she is the reason it holds. Amy is a caseworker in a care system running on empty, the sort of person a society leans on precisely because she never asks it to lean back.

She has moved in with her best friend after a break-up, two women sharing a flat and a profession that hands them other people’s anger for a living. What O’Flynn does with Amy is the whole game: she plays cheerfulness as a decision rather than a mood, a smile bolted on each morning over something more tired underneath. When the characters gather around old standards and someone lands on “The Great Pretender,” the film all but tells you how to watch her.

The reviews out of the mountains have been tender back. TheWrap called it “a gentle little gem”; Deadline filed it as one of Leigh’s best, the warm, unhurried British family portrait he returns to when he is at his surest. If this is the finale the eighty-three-year-old director has hinted at, the consensus goes, it is a fitting one — humane, unforced, a filmmaker making peace in his own register.

That framing is generous, and it is also a little deaf to who is actually carrying the thing. Variety’s Owen Gleiberman, alone in pushing back, found the film “slightly scattershot” and more “schematic than it is powerful.” O’Flynn, he allowed, is “a commanding actor,” but he faulted the film for not investing Amy “with the power of a destiny laid bare” — Leigh, he wrote, keeps tying her to “a larger sociological view” instead of trusting her as a person.

Here is the thing the praise and the dissent are really circling: both are arguing about whether Amy is fully drawn, and both mistake Leigh’s restraint for a gap. His method has always been the opposite of the laid-bare destiny. He and his actors build these people over months, from the inside out, before a plot exists to explain them; what reaches the screen is the withheld part, the interior a real caseworker learns never to show a client. Amy is not underwritten. She is guarded, which is a different and harder thing to act, and O’Flynn plays the seam between the two so cleanly that you can miss how much is being held down.

The private plot is where the sociology stops being abstract. Amy spends her working hours arranging care for strangers; at home, her father begins to slip into the early fog of dementia, and the professional carer discovers there is no case file for your own family. Marion Bailey and Paul Jesson, as her parents, do the film’s most quietly devastating work — the domestic scenes where love and exasperation share a kettle. The state that pays Amy to care is threadbare; the question the film keeps asking, without once making a speech of it, is who does the caring for the carer.

What keeps it honest is Leigh’s refusal to resolve any of it into a lesson. There are no twists, no melodrama, only the accumulating weight of recognizable people, which is exactly what makes O’Flynn’s containment land. Read as a farewell, the film is touching. Read through Amy, it is sharper than touching — a portrait of the person a fraying society uses up, performed by an actor who understands that the tenderest thing you can do on screen is refuse to fall apart on cue.

The film premiered at the Telluride Film Festival and travels on to Toronto and the New York Film Festival before Bleecker Street opens it in U.S. theaters in early December; it runs a lean hundred and seven minutes. Whether or not it proves Leigh’s last, it leaves Amy still standing at the sink, still pretending, still the truest thing in the room.

Tags: Mike Leigh, Kate O'Flynn, Tender Loving Care, film reviews, Marion Bailey