GRADE: A

It took me some time to catch up with Secrets and Lies, but I finally saw it on Thanksgiving Day. The timing could not be more appropriate, really, since that holiday is most closely tied in my mind to family gatherings, especially reluctant ones. Considerations of family are key to Mike Leigh's much-lauded film, which culminates at a forced family gathering turned nearly riotous by the presence of brothers, sisters, in-laws, and strangers.

As the movie begins, a young black Englishwoman named Hortense is helping bury her adoptive mother. In the aftermath of the funeral, something inside compels her to seek out her birth mother. A quick visit to a social worker nets Hortense her own adoption paperwork (her mother, she learns, is white), and a few more minutes of research give her the address of a sad little flat in London's East End.

The resident of that flat is Cynthia Purley (Brenda Blethyn), a lonely woman who keeps her home stuffed full of trinkets from her past, works in a factory, and laments the bitterness incipient in her 20-year old daughter, Roxanne (Claire Rushbrook). She's all but lost touch with her beloved brother, Maurice (Timothy Spall), and his wife, Monica (Phyllis Logan), when Maurice drops by to invite her and her daughter to celebrate Roxanne's impending 21st birthday with a backyard barbecue at his house. Maurice is the comfortably successful owner of a photography studio, and Cynthia blames Monica for having shut her out of his life while building a comfortable, insular home for the two of them.

The mere fact of Maurice's visit is doubtless the highlight of Cynthia's week, but her excitement is overshadowed by shock and trepidation when she receives a phone call from Hortense -- when she realizes she's speaking to the daughter she tried to leave behind, Cynthia slams the telephone down in terror. Hortense rings back immediately, intent on meeting her mother, but Cynthia insists that Hortense must never visit Cynthia's home or even call her again. Eventually, the two of them agree to face each other on neutral ground outside a tube station, and the film's revelatory centerpiece is the ensuing conversation over tea and the profoundly disturbing yet liberating effect it has on Cynthia. Before the film is over, that conversation will prove to have transformed Cynthia and indeed everyone around her.

Mike Leigh's films give "ensemble cast" an enhanced meaning. His performers are in on the creative process, riffing on the material they're given en route to a finished screenplay, and while Leigh's films are distinctly his own, his characters and situations ring with a nearly uncanny truth that seems to indicate the efficiency of this technique. The performances in Secrets and Lies are remarkable, and only the characters of Roxanne and her boyfriend Paul ring a little hollow, perhaps for lack of screen time.

Blethyn in particular is extraordinary. I was reminded immediately of Emily Watson's performance in Breaking the Waves -- another 1996 picture that's utterly reliant on the abilities of its lead performer to penetrate to the essence of a character under the camera's intense scrutiny. Blethyn's Cynthia is admirable, bold, and pathetic all at once. She places an emphasis on her character's faded youth without overstatement and helps Secrets and Lies overcome the more pedestrian of its urges.

Those urges bubble to the surface in a broth that is the climactic birthday party. Cynthia has invited Hortense to the party under the pretense that she's a friend from work. More inexplicably, Hortense has agreed to come along. I'm not spoiling anything by telling you that her presence leads to a dramatic unraveling of some very tightly knotted personalities -- the interest is in seeing how Leigh gets them to the breaking point and what happens to these characters when all hell bursts loose. This screeching, sobbing kaleidoscope of emotion verges on farce, and I think Leigh realizes that -- witness the grimace on Paul's face as he watches the family work through this melodrama.

Mostly, it's a wise and gentle affirmation of our ability to work through the spitefulness that can spoil a family, and a catalog of the ways in which we can absolutely fail to communicate with the people who need us the most. Still, I'm bothered by the nearly glib tidiness of this resolution. It's a fairy tale for dysfunctional adults, right down to Maurice's speechifying at the end -- a diatribe against mistrust that's already been telegraphed by the movie's title. Leigh spends the movie setting up these impacted relationships just to knock 'em down, and I'm afraid that there's a pat structure here that puts me off in the same way that Lone Star disappointed me. Certainly Secrets and Lies lacks the odd narrative and skewed characters that made a first viewing of Leigh's previous film, Naked, such a memorable and unpredictable experience.

But don't get me wrong. Secrets and Lies is 99 percent compelling, beautifully acted, and at times very funny -- through and through, it's one of the best films of the year, with characters that are both down to earth and much larger than life. More than anybody, cinephiles everywhere have Blethyn to thank for one raging catharsis of a performance that reveals in a way that mere words, however carefully scripted, never can.