Career Girls

Mike Leigh's Career Girls (1997) comes so soon on the heels of the magnificent Secrets and Lies (1996) that it is impossible not to be disappointed by the scope and range of it. Yet, to be perfectly blunt, to dismiss this film as merely a minor work trivializes everything that Leigh and his actors get right. And they do get a lot right.

The film is conceived as a story where two former college roommates, Hannah (Katrin Cartlidge) and Annie (Lynda Steadman), reunite after being apart for six years. Given the title, it is apparent that these women are materially successful, but, as they soon reminisce, their personal lives are still as damaged as they were in college. In this respect, the repetition of past traumas coalesces into the present, which is a prominent theme that Leigh handles with taste and subtlety.

Given that this is a Leigh picture, the strengths of Career Girls lie in the writing and the performances. Cartlidge is as dynamic as ever, as when Hannah and Annie go loft hunting. Stumbling upon an awe-inspiring loft inhabited by a perpetual stoner (Andy Serkis), Hannah’s barb at him is wonderfully vitriolic: "I suppose on a clear day you can see the class struggle from here."

Leigh intersects their stories with their college days, and events naturally unfold that link these scenes, so that time is but an equilibrium between the two periods. Unfortunately, since the college day scenes feel more cursory and concentrated around mannerisms than they feel like legitimate scenes, they do impede on the film’s pacing a bit.

The film is at its best, then, when concentrating on Hannah and Annie’s present-day lives, and in the interplay between them and a disturbed college classmate (Joe Tucker), now grown up in his own right. Given how their traumas still haunt them, it is telling that Tucker’s character does not remember either of the women, though he had a relationship with both of them in college. These realistic details give the picture a greater complexity and allow it to move out of the box of a woman’s picture.

At the end of the day, Leigh’s Career Girls cannot match the brilliance of either Secrets and Lies or Naked, but it is still a strong film worth seeing for the dialogue and for its study of the affects of time upon character.

Career Girls: 7/10