‘Tender Loving Care’ Review: Mike Leigh’s Tale of Social Workers, Lonely Hearts and Dementia Should Have Been a Fuller Portrait

Its characters are trying to take care of each other in a world that's forgetten how to. Every so often, the British writer-director Mike Leigh makes a movie in which the stars — and the tartly casual dramatic scenes — line up, coalescing into a full-on vision of prickly humanity. It happened in “Secrets & Lies” (1996), admittedly a kind of “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” for the art-house crowd, though in its neorealist-sitcom way it was a movie that fired on all cylinders.

It happened in “Topsy-Turvy” (1999), Leigh’s sublime Gilbert and Sullivan biopic — easily his greatest film, which is quite the irony given that it’s the furthest he ever strayed from his working-class fixations. It happened, too, in “Another Year” (2010), his scaldingly funny riff on the melancholy of middle age. This one has a handful of vivid characters who are lively and touching company.

The actors, as is always the case in a Mike Leigh film, inhabit their roles with uncanny everyday verve. You might say, “What’s not to like?” But Watching “Tender Loving Care,” I had the sense of wanting Leigh to go deeper into his characters — into the dreams holding their lives together, and the trauma underlying their daily grind. Leigh doesn’t make any wrong moves here; just about every scene in the movie plays.

Yet “Tender Loving Care” builds (or maybe I should say recedes) to something more schematic than it is powerful. The title sounds inviting, but what does it mean? It refers to about five different things at once, and that fuzziness is actually a bit of problem, in terms of cueing the audience to what the film is about.

Amy (Kate O’Flynn), the spiky-on-the-surface but really quite winsome central character, and her best friend, the more merciless but superficial Rosie (Alice Bailey Johnson), are social workers, so they’ve dedicated their lives to helping people — but the tender loving care they offer is starting to fall on deaf ears. Amy has the look of a beaming nun: smiling, devotional, hair pulled back in a way that’s a touch prim. We see her attempt to engage one emotionally lost teen foster child after another, but they’re not engaging with her.

Amy still cares, but does the system care? The background of the film is the budget slashes that are happening in this sector all over the Western world, as the government withdraws its own form of care. Amy has moved back into Rosie’s comfy apartment after five years, during which Amy was living with a man; but now he’s abandoned her and gone back to his wife in Glasgow.