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Another Year (2010)

Director: Mike Leigh

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From Time Out London

Mike Leigh isn’t the sort of filmmaker to make major departures with each new film, to decide suddenly to experiment with sci-fi or set an entire film in a broom cupboard. He can certainly surprise, as with the hellish urban odyssey of ‘Naked’ or the Victorian operatics of ‘Topsy-Turvy’, but mostly this 67-year-old British director makes contemporary, humane dramas about fictional ordinary folk and, from film to film, gently builds on themes and interests relating to how, why and where we live our lives today.

But there’s a cyclical, contemplative tone to ‘Another Year’ that’s unfamiliar, especially after the short, sharp energy bursts of ‘Happy-Go-Lucky’ and the climactic tragedy of ‘Vera Drake’. Like ‘Life Is Sweet’ or ‘All or Nothing’, it’s another film that warmly observes a married couple, their family and their relations with themselves and the outside world. Yet there’s a wisdom and restraint to this film and a confidence of purpose that makes it Leigh’s most mature work to date.

It follows a year in the life of a sixtysomething couple, Tom (Jim Broadbent) and Gerri (Ruth Sheen). He’s a commercial geologist; she’s an NHS therapist, a member of ‘the caring professions’, says her husband, adding jokingly, ‘I don’t care.’ They live together in a home on a quiet street somewhere in suburbia that reflects their settled, earthy personalities. They’re social creatures, and it’s their interaction with friends and family that Leigh focuses on, mostly in their home, over lunch, dinner or a drink at their kitchen table.

Through Tom and Gerri, we meet others at close quarters. Some, we encounter briefly, such as Gerri’s depressed patient, Janet (Imelda Staunton), or a friend, Jack (Phil Davis), with an absent, troubled wife. Others, we come to know better. There’s their old friend Ken (Peter Wight), who visits from the North during the summer and masks an unhappy personal life with ample smoking, drinking and eating, and their son, Joe (Oliver Maltman), a balanced professional who seems sanguine about being single and pops round to see them at home or at their allotment.

It’s at the latter where we see Tom and Gerri at work each season, their gardening offering a nod to the film’s sense of time passing, cycles turning and life going by as we move through spring, summer and winter, each chapter titled as such. Later on, during a beautifully filmed, sombre winter trip to a funeral in Derby, we meet Ronnie (David Bradley), Tom’s older brother, a quiet, bereaved man, a world away in experience and aura from his sibling. Gary Yershon’s meditative, sometimes jaunty score adds to the air of everyday resignation, while cinematographer Dick Pope offers a number of quietly sly framings and makes the most of the story’s seasonal changes.

Each of Tom and Gerri’s friends and family throw light on how stable and contented Tom and Gerri’s lives are, and vice versa. But none more so than Mary (Lesley Manville), a colleague of Gerri, a secretary, a little younger, and a woman whose self-image is all askew. She’s single and unhappy, with a traumatic romantic history, but tries to hide it through mania, wishful thinking, delusions about her age and, again, alcohol. Mary also behaves badly, and a run-in with someone close to Tom and Gerri tests their patience, causing Mary to be temporarily exiled from their welcoming nest.

Mary emerges as the film’s great tragedy, the embodiment of Gerri’s comment: ‘Life’s not always kind, is it?’ Her presence turns ‘Another Year’ from a study of contentment into a portrait of loneliness and longing. Mary tests the patience of both her friends and us, bringing us to another of Leigh’s chief interests: the limits of compassion. How far can we go to help others? Is there always an element of self-interest to caring? And why do we seek comfort in those who can’t offer it? They are all questions that ring in our ears as the film closes on a powerful, open image. It reminds us of Manville’s quietly devastating performance and the stellar work of her fellow cast.

Author: Dave Calhoun

Time Out London Issue 2098: 4 – 10 November, 2010

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User reviews of this film

rodge said...

Posted on Jun 23 2011 10:46 I think you're all worrying too much about this film. You must know the way Mr Leigh works. He just tells them the situation and gets them to think up lines and act them out. So it's bound to be a bit random and in this case rather dreary.

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CPEBach said...

Posted on Jun 23 2011 10:15 Nina - I am in total agreement. I was confused too: initially I thought that there was no possibility that Mr Leigh could have designed Tom and Gerri as he had and consider them 'heroes'. But then I read an interview with him and that's exactly what he considered them to be. This pair of vicious, two-faced, smug, well-heeled hippies fed their friends' alcohol habits, made minimal effort to help them survive their very obvious crises, and then ultimately stabbed them in the face. I'd have bought Mary a new motor if she'd bottled the pair of them. Plot aside, the film was indeed too long. (But better than being stuck on a plane with Tom on one side and Gerri on the other, I suppose).

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Nina said...

Posted on Jun 22 2011 20:41 Just saw this on the plane. Yawn...what a waste of two hours, even if it was spent in a metal box. I agree with everyone who stated that the lead pair - the pair that so seemed to be made the 'heroes' were a pair of cruel, boring, self indulgent, patronising and brutally smug characters. I left this film feeling very confused...did Leigh want me to feel thai way over his leads?? And God, the son and his irritating girlfriend were just the worst...I wanted poor Mary to bottle her at one point. I felt Mary was the real hero of the story, it's just a shame that the script turned her into a hideous cliche of what it's like to be a real person with real faults... 2 stars for the effort put in.

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rodge said...

Posted on Jun 06 2011 19:21 Eh?

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Tim said...

Posted on Jun 05 2011 14:03 If the couple were so crule, why invite the brother down to stay for a few days. That's not creul, he'd lost his wife and needed family comforting. Pluz its obvious their paitence with her run thin, they didn't have the balls the say enough is enough. Mary wasn't emotionally reliable, she acted as leech on people, she was perfectly grown up enough to sort herself out, she just acted elusive to make people feel that was mentally incapible of standing on her feet and wanted to drag people in to help her. She didn't like the son really, just an easily manipulated target in order to cure her lonieness. If you seen notes on scandal, your know what I'm talking about. Like she hampered the brother at the door, he was obviosuly week willed, so he just let her in. I think the couple were just good at keeping a straight face, she worked as a helper for people, so for a long period, she'd adjusted to the topics discussed, you have to working in the job she was doing.

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CPEBach said...

Posted on May 03 2011 09:36 Sue - couldn't agree more. A slightly self-indulgent film whose main characters are smug and quietly vicious to their 'friend'. Irritating characters shouldn't colour one's view of a film, but having read an interview with Mike Leigh in which he seems to treat Tom and Jerry as heroes, I find it even more difficult to like this film on its own merit. Something to give on DVD to annoying Guardian-reading associates to see if they see the joke.

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Sue said...

Posted on Apr 30 2011 22:04 I can't believe this film received such positive reviews - poor Mary has made a few unfortunate choices but has, she thinks, good friends in Tom and Gerri. Unfortunately she has no idea that this smug, patronising couple are cruel and merciless. The relationship is no friendship. It appears they tolerate Mary for her entertainment value, fuel her with alcohol which heightens the contrast between her apparent emotional state and thiers, and feel smug that they will never have to be her. An unbearably 'upbeat' and patronising new daughter in law is the catalyst for the incident that brings things to a head "this is my family, Mary". A sad statement on life which seems to suggest those who find the right mate early in life are the only ones content with their lives as they age.

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rodge said...

Posted on Apr 02 2011 22:46 Oh dear, I wanted to like Mr Leigh's film but it was overly long, annoying music and an utterly unbelievable script/performance from Maggie. Sorry. On the positive, yet another superb effort from Mr Broadbent.

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Peter van der Sluijs said...

Posted on Mar 17 2011 19:47 One of those love it or hate it movies.I loved it. I really like the ragged, random Mike Leigh approach to film making. In the opening sequence he creates a clear expectation that the movie will be about the patient. Nah. That's boring. Let's make a movie about the counsellor instead.

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seniorviewer said...

Posted on Mar 08 2011 17:58 Saw this film at a senior viewing. I think if I had had a gun with me I would have shot myself.

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Mandy said...

Posted on Mar 06 2011 21:49 Peter Wights performance was so brilliant I could feel his indigestion. Manville' performance was beyond brilliant BUT other than the pleasure of their acting abilities there was little to recommend this film...rated in terms of time well spent this film gets a 1* The only thoughts it provokes is about the apparently 'deserving' misery of status beyond being married

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Marg said...

Posted on Mar 03 2011 04:54 Hated it. Big message - couples are happy, singles are neurotic alcoholic messes. Unbearably smug couple. Mary so over-acted, presume she was nominated for the Razzies?

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Ian Pollock said...

Posted on Feb 27 2011 08:27 I agree with you David. It's tedious and boring. I had to restrain myself from hitting fast forward. Some people seem to equate "real" with "messed up". And btw sanctimonious, all hugging counsellor Gerri...who "had the alcoholic teacher in today" it''s quite plain that Mary and Ken are alcoholics so why do you serve alcohol when they visit? That makes you an enabler

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Everly said...

Posted on Feb 07 2011 03:57 Most harsh reality in this movie is the comparison of what people are like in what they do for living and what they do in life: one counsels the woebegone and sleepless by demanding family secrets; another helps those poor and without English capabilities about to be evicted from their homes. Yet: when a woman enters their homes who speaks English but has no mate, no house to call her own, no children, and a secretarial job----she is only the cushion for their comfort. Her poverty and loneliness buoy them up; she makes them feel lucky. She can sob at their chests and beg for love and luck: they coolly suggest counselors and 'perhaps giving her a ring sometime.' In short, the way the luckies treat the unlucky one in this film makes the luckies look like Nazis, determined to have a scapegoat to punish. Masterful, incisive criticism of the do-gooders with degrees in this world; it is about as amply rich as a tale showing the family law judge pointing out all the happy photographs of adoptions she has presided over---but also showing her quickly turning her back when she is asked how many children have been shepherded, miserable, from their schools and homes with police escorts to comply with forced 'custody' rightments.
A film to see, and admire.

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MargaretinOz said...

Posted on Jan 30 2011 06:18 I'm not English so all the more subtle markers about class are lost on me. What's not lost is that people make choices and live with the consequences, and sometimes it works out and sometimes, it's not so pretty. The alcoholic behavior of the two lonely people (one of whom also had a tertiary education so can't be easily typecast as a prole, as a reviewer here put it) be viewed as a consequence of their unhappiness as it was adding immeasurably to their problems, counselling might help but then so would AA. As an older woman said to her even more elderly companion, "Well, that didn't teach me anything new. Don't be lonely and don't get old! Still, I found it mesmerisingly good. 4 stars.

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