Another Year - Mike Leigh

Another Year, like most of Mike Leigh’s work, is a film that is content to simply watch its characters. It moves slowly, bending itself to the rhythms of the routines of its characters, occasionally disrupted by some event or another but always quickly settling back into the familiar. It is a rich character film, though it may be too slow moving for some and doesn’t quite reach the joyful heights of Leigh’s previous film, Happy Go Lucky.

The film centers on Tom (Jim Broadbent) and Gerri (Ruth Sheen), a long-married and very content couple, and follows them through the course of a year, breaking the narrative up into chapters according to the seasons. “Spring,” the opening section, finds Tom and Gerri focusing on their garden and enduring the dramatics of Gerri’s co-worker and friend Mary (Lesley Manville). Though in her initial scenes Mary makes a point of telling Gerri about how happy she is with her life, she quickly unravels after a few glasses of wine, becoming a sobbing mess too drunk to get home. As the film progresses we see that she is far from alone in being drawn to Tom and Gerri, and compelled to confess the darkest of secrets at the slightest prompting. Like moths to a flame, strays are attracted to the inherent comfort of Tom and Gerri’s stability.

 Another Year is the kind of film where “nothing happens,” though things are in fact happening. In “Summer” Gerri and Mary’s co-worker, Tanya (Michele Austin), has a baby and Mary develops a crush on Tom and Gerri’s son, Joe (Oliver Maltman). In “Autumn” Joe finds love with the vibrant and engaging Katie (Karina Fernandez), which devastates Mary, whose reaction ends up driving a wedge between her and Gerri. In “Winter” Tom and Gerri’s sister-in-law passes away, leading to tense family scenes at the funeral and the couple taking in Tom’s brother, Ronnie (David Bradley), as he struggles to get back on his feet. The film ebbs and flows with the tides of life and depends less on the plot than it does on the characters, who are drawn with an almost brutal realism.

No character is more brutal than Mary who, though not technically the protagonist, slowly becomes the story’s central figure. This usurpation of the narrative is perhaps a necessity because for a story to work, it needs a character who wants something. Tom and Gerri are the picture of contentment; they have everything they need and everything they want and anything else is just icing on the cake. You can’t drive a story forward with that, however, and so a character like Mary is required. Mary is a woman of naked ambition and desperation, played with intensity by Manville. She’s so unhappy and so broken down, a train wreck of a person that you simply cannot look away from. Her pursuit of Joe is sad because she makes it so obvious and she so completely sacrifices her dignity as she lays herself bare for all to see. The long scene in which she learns of Joe’s relationship with Katie is difficult to watch because Leigh approaches it in such an unblinking way and so we are forced to watch as it becomes more and more awful, as Mary’s behaviour becomes uglier and uglier. Leigh allows us to have no illusions about Mary but it would be incorrect to say that he is without affection for her. The film’s final shot, a lingering look at Mary, is suggestive of a deep sympathy for her, for the ways that her disappointments have shaped her into the person she is now. She’s not perfect but she is human and the film sees her flaws clearly without completely writing her off because of them.

Manville is the standout of the cast, her performance alternately maddening and heartbreaking, but the entire cast is brilliant. There is not a moment in this film that doesn’t feel absolutely authentic, seeming more like a documentary than a narrative film as it focuses so intensely on how awkward social interactions can sometimes be and the odd tensions that can develop between people. It doesn’t quite have the energy of Leigh’s best films, but it’s a compelling and powerful film nevertheless and well worth a look.

Watch a trailer for the movie here: