Another Year (2010)
Another Year (BRIT) Directed by Mike Leigh Written by Mike Leigh Starring Jim Broadbent; Ruth Sheen; Lesley Manville; Imelda Staunton; Oliver Maltman; Peter Wight; David Bradley; Martin Savage; Karina Fernandez; Michele Austin; Philip Davis
Sixty eight year old Mike Leigh has been producing realist social dramas for some forty years. They are extended slice of life vignettes, really; morality plays (Leigh arose out of a theater background) without the whopping payoffs or didactically delivered life lessons; more often than not tales about simple, working people nuanced with slyly delivered commentary on social morays and class; stories about everyday life events that thankfully seem to shy away from soap opera melodrama.
Yes there have been bigger budgeted period offerings in the last decade-plus that included Topsy Turvy (1999) and Vera Drake (2004), and the look and style have gotten more cinematic as his career has progressed, but Leigh hasn’t ever strayed very far from the kind of low budget films he was making through the BBC at the beginning of his prolific and acclaimed directorial career.
Leigh’s process, now well documented, involves heading into a rehearsal or work-shopping period with the actors without a fully developed script of any kind. Aided by character descriptions, the actors improvise, helping to develop their roles and the dialogue within given scenes, and eventually a written screenplay emerges, culled from this meeting of the minds. Here, Leigh relies on some long time collaborators like Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen, who respectively play Tom and Gerri, a long time married couple nearing retirement age, who form the center-piece of story that explores aging, loneliness, and the contrast between those who are settled (internally, professionally, family/relationship-wise) and those who are decidedly not.
Though his films are normally infused with humor, Leigh is never afraid to expose human pettiness, jealousy, and crassness. He is, almost wholly, uninterested in tying up his stories in bows to be easily delivered for his audiences. No apologist, ambiguity and contradiction abound with the people Leigh chooses to display, and his inclusion of difficult, oft unlikable people, demonstrates an abiding desire to reflect life back to us by challenging our perceptions of human nature, the human condition, and in the process, ourselves. Like Cassavettes, Leigh’s particular representation of reality ironically (or perhaps naturally) has a stylization of its own, and to some the awkward pauses and constant chatter may be off-putting. The fidelity of endeavoring to achieve some form of truth by refusing to beautify the words and people, however, almost always leads us to transcendent moments of realization and emotional resonance so rarely achieved in cinema.
Another Year is quite true to its title as we merely observe the outwardly mundane passing of a calendar year in the lives in of an aging couple and their small social sphere that includes a few of their friends, their son, and his new girlfriend. Very little information is provided up front about their pasts, and we only manage to glean bits and pieces of their personal and shared histories as we go.
Tom, a geological engineer, and Gerri, a social worker, seem relatively happy with with their relatively small lives. Owners of a modest, but comfortable and warm home, they share a common passion for cooking, and for the gardening they do in a collective, and they genuinely seem to enjoy one another’s company. Their son, Joe, a thirty year old lawyer, begins the film unattached, but eventually meets Katie (Karina Fernandez), a clinical physical therapist for the elderly, and the two seem quite happy together. This nuclear family, and that of Gerri’s co-worker Tanya, seem to stand in sharp contrast to the disintegrating lives of some others we come in contact with - namely, Gerri’s messy alcoholic, neurotic co-worker Mary (Lesley Manville), and Tom’s obese, alcoholic, and depressed friend Ken (Peter Wight) and nearly catatonic brother Ronnie (Lesley Manville), all three of whom seeming like they are one more life blow away from jumping off a bridge.
In Happy-Go-Lucky, Leigh was unafraid to show us a lead character who could be annoyingly chipper; here, it is the secondary characters who drive us nuts with their neediness, lack of connection, and unease. Lesley Manville is the standout and easily the most grating of these down in the mouth souls, a bundle of constant talk and nervous energy, the thinly veiled despair, desperation, and fear emanating from her every pore. Despite the powerful cast (that includes the wonderful Imelda Staunton in a cameo) the film lives in Manville’s Mary, and it is only when she is finally silenced that the power of her folly and utter unhappiness is fully realized.