Meantime is the portrait of a London family who share a cramped East End apartment and little else. Our hero is Colin (Tim Roth), a simple-witted boy who has gone into his father's line of work-the dole line-while his mother spends her days playing bingo and his cynical older brother, Mark, manages to beat him at every turn in an already miserable life. We have to laugh at Colin, but we feel guilty and helpless while we're doing it. Gary Oldman is wonderfully Oldmanesque as the street punk, Coxy, whose edgy antics push the film into a theater of the absurd. Even more than in High Hopes, in Meantime we see the meanness of Thatcherism: Colin isn't just simple, he's been simplified. The post-apocalypse is everpresent in this housing project with its large spaces where no one walks and papers blow in the wind and no one does anything. "What're you doing Tuesday?" is a rhetorical question. (A lecture, delivered by the block manager cum G-man, on "The Anthill" rivals the diatribe by the social worker at the end of Home Sweet Home for irrelevancy. Only Colin, in his blessed density, has a fitting response: "We got ants?") Still, the breakdown in Meantime comes in a surprising corner. Colin and Co. have nothing to break.