"Career Girls" lacks nuance, just like real life

The title of Mike Leigh's new film is a bit misleading. There are no office politics or interdepartmental romances figuring into Career Girls' itinerary, just a simple--and, at times, flimsy--story of two college roommates, Hannah and Annie, reuniting for a weekend after six years apart. We watch them greet each other awkwardly, even a little warily, in the train station, and the movie itself also seems to have its guard up: in the scenes that follow, we learn disconcertingly little about these women's present-day lives, career-related or otherwise. There are conversational snippets about a painful breakup here, a managerial mishap there, but that's about it, as if Leigh doesn't want his audience in on anything that Hannah and Annie aren't telling each other. With his heavy reliance on flashback sequences to contrast where they've been and where they are, Leigh's primary interest is in to what extent his characters' "grown-up" lives are a reaction to those crucial college years. The approach precludes the development of truly multifaceted characters, but the discretion and honesty with which Leigh approaches his subject, ironically, necessitates these narrowed expectations.

Career Girls' flashback scenes yank us along in the grim, frenetic momentum of the protagonists' college years--Hannah (Katrin Cartlidge) is an almost maniacally caustic tough-girl, Annie (Lynda Steadman) a meek, squeaky-voiced wraith, her face scabbed over by dermatitis. Leigh composes these sometimes hilarious, sometimes painful scenes efficiently and, for the most part, without sentiment. He drains most of the color from the print, and the effect approaches black-and-white documentary. The present-day segments are shot in warm, understated tones to complement Hannah and Annie's smoothed-out edges; if their past looks like an Alex Cox movie, then their present resembles a Hallmark card (appropriate, perhaps, since Hannah works in a stationery store). Their lives are unfulfilled and a little numb; over dinner they speak in flat platitudes about themselves, like "I'm not strong enough to be as vulnerable as you are" (Hannah) and "I don't remember my childhood, that's why memory is so important to me" (Annie). One might complain that Leigh is being lazy, telling--and blandly at that--instead of showing, but his actors have perfectly captured the cadences of communication between friends after a long absence, when groping to convey all the twists, turns, and detours of lost years devolves, almost inevitably, into facile summary.

Much attention has been paid to Leigh's workshop approach to filmmaking: his movies are borne out of extensive brainstorming and improvisational sessions, and his scripts are pieced together out of this collaborative process. Leigh's ongoing experiment has borne great fruit--notably his realist nightmare Naked--but too much of Career Girls plays like an Actor's Studio workshop gone awry. As Hannah, Cartlidge (who was so fine in Breaking the Waves) doesn't so much speak as bark, spewing insults with her pinched, sharp-edged face contorted, and always in someone else's. Annie is also pretty twitchy, and too shy and conscious of her skin condition to look anyone in the eye. Steadman alerts us to the now clear-skinned Annie's newfound maturity in the present-day scenes with a new tic, whereby she thrusts out her chin and bugs out her eyes. Never before in film has an attractive young actress made such a concerted effort to gesturally evoke Peter Lorre. In one flashback scene, Hannah and Annie are helping their lumpen, speech-impeded friend Ricky move into their flat; the camera frames them from the shoulders up, and the triage of bobbing, nodding, and twitching heads is dizzying to behold. When I complained to a friend about the actors' overmannered performances, he argued, "But it's a dialogue." Problem is, it's not a modulated one. In Leigh's Secrets and Lies, the hysterical mother and the acid-tongued daughter were balanced out by the rocklike brother and the pacific other daughter, but Career Girls' policy is one of equal-opportunity scenery-chewing. Each tic and mannerism turns the actors' performances further inward, and in searching for their own moment, they miss everyone else's. It's a monologue, in stereo.

Because Leigh wants to explore Hannah and Annie's past as a part of their present, he engineers a narrative whereby, in two short days bumming around London, they run into the smarmy cad who broke both their hearts in college (played by the sly Joe Tucker, the only actor dealing in nuance here), then a former roommate, and then pathetic Ricky, now homeless and half-mad. When Hannah and Annie first glimpse Ricky sitting outside their old flat, Cartlidge breaks into shameless mugging and marveling about how "weird" is this final coincidence, and here her excessive tendencies serve a purpose--she stops just short of winking at the camera as if to say, "We know we're not getting away with anything here." Leigh is concerned with composing realistic scenes as opposed to a convincing narrative, and with this encounter with Ricky, Career Girls finally becomes less a full-length feature than a series of sketches--a collection of possibilities, occasionally thwarted by actorly overindulgence. It's a work of moviemaking as unwieldy, contrived, and fleetingly sweet as any reunion between old friends. Which is to say, whatever its faults, Career Girls is all true, and maybe that's enough.

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