Critical Reception
The film received very favourable reviews, and it is one of the few films on the Rotten Tomatoes review collaboration site to enjoy a 100% fresh rating at present. The Guardian film reviewer awarded the film seven stars out of a possible ten. Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times was full of praise, commenting that in spite of the constraints of independent film production, the film was "as funny, spontaneous and free as if it had been made on a lark by a millionaire" He added that "By the end of Life is Sweet we are treading close to the stuff of life itself - to the way we all struggle and make do, compromise some of our dreams and insist on the others. Watching this movie made me realize how boring and thin many movies are; how they substitute plots for the fascinations of life." Hal Hinson of the Washington Post called the film "sublime" and "gently brilliant". Desson Thompson of the same paper agreed, praising Leigh for discovering "the tragic beauty of the mundane".
David Sexton in the Times Literary Supplement was critical however, and said that "the film never transcends sit-com and remains static and anecdotal, its unit the scene, not the complete story." Further, he wrote that the film is, " the product of an unresolved attitude to its subject matter and in particular of an uneasy relation to questions of class." Philip French, in The Observer countered this idea: "Leigh has been called patronising. The charge is false. The Noël Coward/David Lean film This Happy Breed, evoked by Leigh in several panning shots across suburban back gardens, is patronising. Coward and Lean pat their characters on the back...Leigh shakes them, hugs them, sometimes despairs over them, but never thinks that they are other than versions of ourselves."
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