Tender Loving Care Gives Kate O’Flynn a Perfect Star Turn

Mike Leigh is known for being an unconventional star-maker, a filmmaker whose eye for talent and gift for creating devastating characters means that he’s provided now-familiar actors like Brenda Blethyn and David Thewlis with their big-screen breakouts. He clearly spotted something in Kate O’Flynn as well, though it would take the rest of the world almost two decades to catch up. Years before her breakthrough as peaky outcast Patricia Moyer on Widow’s Bay, O’Flynn played the punky younger sister Suzy in 2008’s Happy-Go-Lucky — a small but nicely unamused performance in a film that otherwise belonged to Sally Hawkins’s ebullient Poppy. O’Flynn would go on to play bit parts in Mr. Turner and Peterloo, but in Leigh’s latest work, Tender Loving Care, she takes the spotlight as Amy, a social worker who moves back in with her best friend after the demise of a five-year relationship. That O’Flynn’s newfound fame has coincided with her starring role in this gentle, melancholy wonder of a movie is a fitting, if unplanned, convergence. Having given O’Flynn her start, Leigh now stands to get a boost from her elevated profile for a film he’s said is likely to be his last.

There is a touch of Poppy to Amy, who tries to greet the world with a cheery face. But O’Flynn always lets you know that for her character, this is an active effort — not a mask she puts on, necessarily, but a choice she has to keep making. She enters the movie with the loose-limbed goofiness of an air dancer, rocking up to the window of her former apartment as though being a 39-year-old with a roommate was always part of the plan. While she and the equally upbeat Rosie (Alice Bailey Johnson), who’s a colleague as well as a pal, pick up right where they left off, they also artfully sidestep around Amy’s heartbreak, which can be felt only at the edges of O’Flynn’s expressions, in her determined eyes and a slight tremulousness in her grin. Amy’s ex, who left her to return to his wife in Scotland, may have been a controlling twat who Amy’s parents, Birdie (Marion Bailey) and Geoff (Paul Jesson), are more than relieved their daughter is rid of. But half a decade is a long time to lose to someone who just resumed the life they used to lead as though it were nothing, and Amy, right on the cusp of middle age, also finds herself in uncertain territory.

Tender Loving Care is a late-career movie in the most affectionately meant sense, kicking into gear as a meditation on mortality when Geoff, who’d previously been living an aging but steady and happy existence with his wife in their charming ground-floor flat, starts declining. It is very much like Leigh, who has been dealing with health issues himself, to train his focus not on the dying man but on the two generations of women contending with the difficult things that will come next. Bailey, Leigh’s longtime partner and a regular in his films, gives a quietly wrenching turn as someone abruptly confronted with the reality that she’ll face the last chapter of her life without the partner she has been with for decades. And yet, despite the sadness hanging over the movie, the disappointments of the beginning meeting up with the prospect of death toward the end, Tender Loving Care is very much a tribute to trudging forward — not with a stiff upper lip but with some chat about the neighbors, endless cups of tea, and an overreliance on white wine.

It’s a film about the small gestures, the minor feats of fortitude and acts of generosity that keep the world running, smoothing over the rough patches in life, though not without effort. That’s there on Amy’s face, in her smile and wet eyes as she launches into song with her ailing and confused dad, or in the way that Rosie comes back from having been stood up on a date and opts to turn her hurt into an amusingly outraged anecdote. It’s there in the interludes we see of both women at work — Amy focused on minors in foster care, Rosie on older people who appear to be in need of services. Tender Loving Care isn’t an optimistic movie — it in fact directly deals with how much its characters feel like they’re ineffectual, under-resourced, and having to make incredibly difficult calls in terms of when and how much to intervene. But their devotion to doing the most good that they can, despite all the limitations and despite how rarely they’re greeted with anything other than resentment, gives them a stubborn, small-scale nobility. The world may be an increasingly forbidding place in which our sense of community and willingness to care for one another is crumbling, but these characters continue to have faith in the value of connection, of extending a hand and a smile, even if it’s one that’s faltering at the corners.

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