The customary comparison of Mike Leigh with Robert Altman on the ground of their common satiric intent represents a fundamental misunderstanding of Leigh's work. Nuts in May is not really a send-up of Birkenstock vegetarians, and if it were it would be a much less important and disturbing film than it is. The characters' problems would be so far from the experience of the average viewer that the movie would be trivial. Most of us are not tree-huggers or folksingers. We don't drink raw milk or chew our food seventy-three times. If that's what the film were about, Keith and Candice-Marie could be written off as kooks, and Nuts in May would be little more than a derisive jeer at the weirdness of a few “nuts” (as the title somewhat misleadingly puts it).

Leigh is not interested in mocking someone else but in showing us things about ourselves. As he has often insisted, there is no “them” in his work. Everywhere we look, we are meant to see ourselves. His hell is never reserved for other people. That is what makes his films so unsettling. We are supposed to take them personally. If we don't, we're not really paying attention.

Keith and Candice-Marie's dietary and behavioral eccentricities are symptoms of a state of imaginative derangement that, in Leigh's view, runs throughout society.