It would be easy to look at British director Mike Leigh's extraordinary Secrets & Lies, which arrives on our shores as the most anticipated cinephile event of the year, as a stunning ensemble piece, a marvelous collection of brilliantly acted moments that highlight a series of unforgettable performances. It's easy to be distracted by the parlor-trickery of Leigh's famous improvisation process (see sidebar), which frequently results in authentic expressions of surprise on characters' faces when they learn something that, in fact, was revealed to the actors only shortly before the cameras rolled.

How Leigh gets these showcases of astonishing acting is less important than the mere fact that he does, and that he puts them to use in telling stories of down-to-earth people that even those viewers not steeped in the English class system can readily recognize and sympathize with. Leigh clearly loves his characters, even those who behave badly. There are very few outright villains in his work (the yuppie landlord in Naked is a rare exception). Perhaps more than any of his films, Secrets & Lies pays tribute to Leigh's acknowledged greatest inspiration, the humanist director Jean Renoir, whose dictum was that everyone has his reasons.

At the center of the film is Cynthia, (Brenda Blethyn, last seen as Brad Pitt's mom in A River Runs Through It). She's a factory worker living in a shabby home in London's East End with her sour-tempered daughter, Roxanne (Claire Rushbrook), a municipal street sweeper. Having all but raised her younger brother, Maurice, on her own, then Roxanne (whose father never married Cynthia), she's essentially been a mother all her life, yet her enormous capacity to give and receive love has gone unfulfilled, as Roxanne scorns her, and Maurice (Timothy Spall, the restaurateur in Leigh's Life Is Sweet) and his upwardly mobile wife, Monica (Phyllis Logan), have avoided her for years. A successful portrait photographer, Maurice feels guilty about never having invited Cynthia or Roxanne (whom he and Monica once cherished like their own daughter) to the new home Monica spends her time decorating, and he resolves to host a barbecue for Roxanne's 21st birthday.

Into their lives comes Hortense (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), a young optometrist who, after the deaths of her beloved adoptive parents, seeks her birth mother. She is astounded to learn that her mother is a white woman; Cynthia, who has repressed the memory of Hortense's conception and has never seen the daughter she gave up, is equally stunned when she finally agrees to meet Hortense and learns that her daughter is black. The heart of the film is in the way both women blossom in this tentative new relationship, so much so that Cynthia boldly invites this stranger to the barbecue, without telling the rest of the family anything about her. The barbecue, of course, plays out in a familial confrontation worthy of Bergman, though Leigh insists that nothing in the film (even the Bergmanesque title) is an homage to a director of whom he says "I don't find Bergman very funny." Secrets is nothing if not funny, though it's also heartrending, wistful, bitter, raucous, painful, and joyous.