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Let’s dispense with the suspense. Mike Leigh has been nominated for an Academy Award seven times and has won it zero times. That seems wrong.
He has a Palme d’Or, a Golden Lion, five decades of films that taught generations
of actors what unglamorous truth looks like and one of the most distinctive bodies of work in modern British cinema. What he does not have is an Oscar — and based on the reviews and reactions out of the Telluride Film Festival, where the film bowed Friday night, it’s about damn time he got one.
“Tender Loving Care” arrives carrying the weight none of Leigh’s previous films did. At 83, and contending with myosotis, a muscle-wasting condition that kept him from his own Telluride premiere, Leigh has said this is most likely his last film. Bleecker Street opens it Dec. 4 after a fall festival run the industry reserves for titles it takes seriously.
That makes the season’s obvious question unavoidable: What should the Academy do with Mike Leigh’s final film? The answer is not — give him an Oscar because he is 83.
It is — watch the movie, and you’ll see why you’d want to.
“Tender Loving Care” does not need a sympathy campaign. It is vintage Leigh — wry, melancholy, humane, alert to the small emotional humiliations that become, over the course of a life, the events that define us. Kate O’Flynn’s Amy anchors it — an Emmy nominee for “Widow’s Bay,” and when the trophies are handed out Sept. 14, very possibly a winner — a social worker steadying a father in decline, gutted by a breakup and kept upright by wine and by Rosie, the live-wire best friend played exquisitely by Alice Bailey Johnson. Marion Bailey, as Amy’s mother, has already emerged from Telluride as a standout, a veteran thespian never given her proper due.
A film about the daily labor of caring for people, made by a filmmaker who has spent 50 years caring, without vanity, about the interior lives most movies never bother to notice. It’s a perfect bookend to a career — and it closes on perhaps the most haunting final shot of any film in a decade. There’s a smaller bookend folded inside it, too: Leigh gave O’Flynn her first job, on “Happy-Go-Lucky,” at 21. She returns for his last.
That sets up a campaign with an unusual shape and real vigor. Leigh carries the legacy narrative, but the film has to prove first that the work is competitive in a year crowded with filmmakers nursing overdue stories of their own.
So the cleanest argument for Leigh is historical, not sentimental.
Seven nominations and zero wins is a remarkable record. Twice — for “Secrets & Lies” and “Vera Drake” — the Academy nominated Leigh for both writing and directing in the same year, the dual embrace it reserves for its favorites. It has honored him again and again without ever closing the final distance. This is not an artist who spent a career waiting for his first invitation.
The performances could help carry him there. O’Flynn and Bailey have the most obvious pathways, though where their teams ultimately campaign is still being sorted — and pundits will argue over where the two should land, which is rarely where they actually do.
When two women read as co-leads, the Academy has grown allergic to rewarding both in the same category: the last time it nominated two lead actresses from a single film was “Thelma & Louise,” Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis, in 1991. So I’d bet the campaign splits them — O’Flynn, the anchor, in lead actress and Bailey in supporting.
It should be duly noted, Bailey Johnson would be a worthy option to join whichever lady decides on the supporting campaign and as the ailing father, Paul Jesson is also incredibly rich and dynamic and would be worthy of consideration.
But Bleecker Street will have to decide where to spend. An intimate British drama cannot campaign on every front with the force of a studio tent-pole.
That is where the festival strategy matters. Telluride built the word-of-mouth. Toronto should widen the critical and industry conversation. The New York Film Festival drops the film into the center of the American awards ecosystem. The distributor’s job now is turning that accumulation into industry votes.
There is a trap in the “last film” framing, too. Leigh’s age and health explain the stakes of the moment, but they should never become the reason to vote. The Academy has a long, familiar habit of honoring artists after the fact. The more respectful campaign makes the case while the artist is still here — still working at full command of his gifts.
This is not a plea for a career-achievement handout. It is simply an argument that the film should earn the consideration on its own merits, and that a body claiming to honor the year’s best would embarrass itself to overlook a master telling us, gently, that he is done.
He named the film “Tender Loving Care.” The least the Academy can do is extend some.
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