Meantime

NOTE: This is a region-1 DVD which requires a region free DVD-player.

A slow-burning depiction of economic degradation in Thatcher’s England, Mike Leigh’s Meantime is the culmination of the writer-director’s pioneering work in television. Unemployment is rampant in London’s working-class East End, where a middle-aged couple and their two sons languish in a claustrophobic public-housing flat. As the brothers (Phil Daniels and Tim Roth) grow increasingly disaffected, Leigh punctuates the grinding boredom of their daily existence with tense encounters, including with a priggish aunt (Marion Bailey) who has managed to become middle-class and a blithering skinhead on the verge of psychosis (a scene-stealing Gary Oldman, in his first major role). Informed by Leigh’s now trademark improvisational process and propelled by the lurching rhythms of its Beckett-like dialogue, Meantime is an unrelenting, often blisteringly funny look at life on the dole.

Special features: 
– New, restored 2K digital transfer, supervised by director of pho­­tog­­raphy Roger Pratt and director Mike Leigh, with uncom­pressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
– New conversation between Leigh and musician Jarvis Cocker
– New conversation between actor Marion Bailey and critic Amy Raphael
– Interview from 2007 with actor Tim Roth
– PLUS: An essay by film scholar Sean O’Sullivan