Starring: Jim Broadbent, Ruth Sheen and Lesley Manville
Written and Directed By: Mike Leigh
Produced By: Georgina Lowe
Distributor: Momentum Pictures
Rating: PG-13
Running Time: Approximately 129 minutes
Website: anotheryear-movie.com
Budget: $8 million
Genre: Drama, Comedy
Release Date: January 28, 2011
At the risk of giving the absolutely wrong impression of this movie by invoking another one: There’s something about Mary. In Another Year, writer-director Mike Leigh’s latest treatise on the lives of the English middle class, Mary is played by Lesley Manville, one of Leigh’s recurring players. Boozy, brash, and with a motor mouth that keeps going long past the point of embarrassment and desperation, Mary is a hurricane that touches down periodically throughout to affect the otherwise calm lives of her friends and co-workers. She’s shrill, awkward, pitiable, and the most identifiably human character in the movie.
Another Year revolves around the immediate social circle of Tom (Jim Broadbent) and Gerri (Ruth Sheen) – there’s exactly one joke about a cartoon cat and mouse – living in a quiet London suburb and enjoying their golden years. They drink tea, tend their garden, and reminisce about their day jobs: he’s a geologist, she’s a counselor at the local clinic. Gerri, intentionally or not, winds up bringing her work home with her. Co-worker Mary is a lonely 40-something, masking her loneliness with alcoholism and an indiscriminate desire to land a man. She even openly lusts for her friends’ adult son, Joe (Oliver Maltman), himself a public advocate. Tom brings home his own strays, like his old friend Ken (Peter Wight), a gluttonous chain smoker trapped in a government job that makes him miserable.
What follows is essentially a series of therapy sessions interrupted by another glass of wine. Tom and Gerri seem to attract the lonely and the neurotic. Their idyllic suburban home plays host to any number of broken minds and bodies. Mike Leigh, the man behind 2008’s Happy-Go-Lucky and revered character studies like Naked and Secrets & Lies, is known as a keen observer of everyday English life, more concerned with the behavior and nuances of a group of people underrepresented on film than narrative momentum. Leigh scoffs at your notions of “plot;” he offers these characters up for observation and judgment, expectations be damned. The viewer is meant to side with Tom and Gerri, joining them in watching the frequently grotesque displays and thinking, “Those poor people… thank God it’s not me!”
The happy couple live a contented life together, as is commented upon by everyone around them, but it’s a life achieved by pointedly avoiding confrontation, even at the expense of their supposed friends and family. It’s a lesson they pass on to their son, who treats Mary’s obvious affection for him with equal parts revulsion and curious indulgence.
Suffused with brief bursts of comedy, Another Year is still very much a drama, one where even a death – of a minor character, off-screen – is treated with a level of detachment drained of all dramatic weight. Leigh seems to be saying that the only way to get through life happily is by being sympathetic without becoming involved. Tom and Gerri and Joe live and listen contentedly, but never cross that line into actually helping the various sorry souls who cross their path.
Another Year puts forward every event – a dinner party, a cup of tea, a game of golf, a funeral – as part of the long, gray wash of events of a life, to be experienced but not absorbed. Somewhere there’s a happy medium between Mary’s raw emotionalism and Tom and Gerri’s practiced ambivalence, but the characters always have one more year ahead of them to figure it out.
3 Stars
