BBC2 Playhouse: Grown-Ups's poster

BBC2 Playhouse: Grown-Ups

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Siskoid
Mike Leigh's Grown-Ups is one of the most working class things he's ever done, and that's saying something. A tooth-grinding comedy that marks his first collaborations with Lesley Manville and Brenda Blethyn, who would both go on to great things (with and without Leigh). Manville is half of a young couple who move into a council house, next door to slightly higher class school teachers who nevertheless are as unhappy and tasteless as their lower-class neighbors. The pair get constant visits from Blethyn playing her older sister, a very needy character unable to cut the umbilical, taking things to extremes in a way that's both comical (and had me exploding with laughter) and tragic, especially as it's all heading for one of those Mike Leigh resolutions, i.e. a screaming match whose fallout will reorder the characters' lives (at least, somewhat... maybe they'll even start to act like grown-ups - but there is a distinction between "grown-up" and "adult").