The "prison visit" is the most cliched of movie scenes, and yet Michael Winterbottom makes it the basis of a valuable, meticulously observed and wonderfully acted social-realist feature about a family under pressure; it was originally shown on Channel 4 television, but entirely deserves its cinema release. John Simm plays Ian, a guy doing a jail sentence – what for, we are never explicitly told, but, given that he smuggles some hash back in prison after getting a day outside with his family for good behaviour, we can assume a drugs charge. Shirley Henderson plays his wife and the mother of his four children, Karen, and we see the sheer grind of caring for them on her own and regularly getting them up at four in the morning and travelling halfway across the country to visit him for an agonisingly short time.
Remarkably, the film was shot piecemeal over five years, so we can see the children growing up as Ian must see them – in sudden, heartstopping little jumps. While Ian does his time in the grim nick, Karen and the children seem in some ways to be living a gentle, pleasant existence in bucolic East Anglia. Yet those vast landscapes are empty without Ian, and Karen is experiencing intolerable loneliness; when he finally gets out, Ian must come to terms with a situation his choices have helped to create. This humanist, optimist picture has something in common with Robert Guédiguian and Ken Loach, and it’s another great success for the endlessly creative and productive Winterbottom.
