Unique!

Mike Leigh's worldview is both distressing yet also strangely comforting. I fully understand why some people attack his characters in this film as being caricatures because yeah they kinda are caricatures, but in all this Leigh finds a remarkable amount of truth (not to mention thematic complexity and, crucially, comedy) which I doubt would have the same impact were he to tell the tales he wants to tell with more "realistic" characters. This is a great, moving and surprisingly poetic film.

To be human is to be hypocritical. We will never know how to unify our internal beliefs with our external actions. We will always be two separate entities in an impossible battle.