Another Year (2010) Reviews

• Mike Leigh turns the trivial into the truly tragic

  jamesgill-12010-10-25

  Mike Leigh's latest film Another Year follows the story of a happily married couple approaching their retirement years. Their warm relationship offers them security as the the film progresses. Their friends and family, by contrast, all struggle to some extent with unhappiness, and a sense that their best years may be behind them. The film is a story of ageing; the small events that can make life either comforting or unbearable; and the refuge that companionship can offer. Rut Sheen's role as Gerri is superb. Her open, welcoming face invites her friend and colleague Mary (played by Lesley Manville) to open up to her about her drunken fears of where her life is leading. Jim Broadbent's Tom is charming and self-effacing, confident in his own happiness yet nonplussed at the failure of his friend Ken – Peter Wight – to come to terms with growing old. The film dwells on the small, predominantly non-verbal signals that reveal emotional and social insecurity. Leigh's direction reminds us that the sharpest insights into character lie in moments where we think we at our most concealed. Faces betray what we wish were kept private – at moments where verbal communication fails, physical expression lights up hidden fears, passions, failings and desires. Leigh treats all his characters with a certain dignity – whilst there are moments where we are encouraged to laugh at their social inadequacies, for the most part we suffer along with them, knowing that their experiences are all too near reality to take lightly. We encourage Tom and Gerri to keep supporting their despairing friends, yet knowing at the same time that their married happiness can only serve to mock their friends' lonely lives further. The four strictly partitioned seasons of the film point towards a growing anxiety that it may in fact be too late for these lost characters. The cyclical nature of the structure suggests that there is no real remedy for those left unloved and lonely at the film's conclusion. From the opening scene, where a woman silently struggles to recollect the happiest moment in her life, to the point when the dialogue slowly fades away to leave Mary isolated and forlorn, we cannot help but be both enchanted and dismayed by the emotional honesty of Mike Leigh's characters. This is what sets out the director as a truly gifted artist – his ability to heighten the routine into the dramatic; and to make the trivial, truly tragic.

• Another existentialist classic by Mike Leigh

  dharmendrasingh2010-11-18

  Tom and Gerri (Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen), the couple at the centre of Mike Leigh's latest existential piece, couldn't be more unlike the cartoon characters who share their names. Together for several decades, their love for each other has only grown. I wouldn't complain if my marriage looked like theirs when I'm in my 50s. When he isn't working as a geologist and she isn't counselling people, they spend their time providing solace to those who need it – Ken (Peter Wight), a straight-talking, John Smiths-drinking Yorkshireman; Ronnie (David Bradley), Tom's laconic brother whose wife has just died; and most of all Mary (Lesley Manville), a jittery colleague of Gerri's in the middle of a mid-life crisis. It is Mary who dominates the film and who most elicits our empathy. She is without love and possibly even without the hope of love. It is genuinely painful to see her disintegrate scene by scene. As another year in Tom and Gerri's life unfolds, we see nothing particularly fascinating happen. They tend to their allotment, they invite people to their house for food and company, and they reminisce about their experiences. Nothing could be more trivial, right? Wrong. This film is about growing old and making the right choices as one gets to old age. Above all it's about recognising that happiness is less a right than an aspiration. The word 'integrity' comes to mind when I think of Mike Leigh. Who else could convince actors to sign up to films where there was no script to begin with? Throughout his career he has eschewed the Hollywood system and has done things his own way ('Given the choice of Hollywood or poking steel pins in my eyes, I'd prefer steel pins'). An audience member expostulated at the end, 'That wasn't very uplifting'. She's correct, but Leigh doesn't offer folly or fantasy. He's a truth-seeking social observer and commentator. What's also appealing about Leigh is that he doesn't spoon-feed his audience. His films compel the watcher to debate what they have seen and draw their own conclusions. Why should films give us answers? I was moved by this film like no other in recent memory. One moment I was laughing uncontrollably, the next I was holding back tears. The film emphasises a sad fact: for some people, things don't always go according to plan. Sometimes we're just plain unlucky. And that's life. www.scottishreview.net

• Big theme movie

  oOgiandujaOo_and_Eddy_Merckx2010-10-25

  This is a big movie tackling big themes, and may, like Happy-Go-Lucky (Mike Leigh's previous film) prove extremely Marmitish. The latter comment may prove hard to understand if you're not British, and that's just like the film (Marmite is a British spread made from yeast extract with a love-it-or-hate-it umami/savoury/salty flavour). Another Year deals with a particularly British form of social breakdown and emotional constipation. In Britain, from the 40s to the 70s there was widespread use of an exam system called the 11+. Up until the age of 11-12 students were schooled together, after that point, students considered to have more potential by the standards of the 11+ examinations were streamed separately in Grammar Schools, prepared for success, whilst those below the boundary line were sent to Secondary Modern Schools where the focus was much more on practical education (bricklaying, "home economics", woodwork, etc). The legacy of this system has been huge social resentment. There is a feeling in Another Year that the system is back, in the form of university education. With the UK attempting to educate 50% of the secondary school student population to university level, a socially engineered bifurcation to haves and have-nots is being created once again. All of the characters in the film are from working class backgrounds and yet the fortunes that life has graced them with are distinctly uneven, they have gone in different directions, absent any idea of a shared experience that may have been the rock of previous generations of Britons. Graduates Tom and Gerri (pun intended) have fulfilling careers, heartfelt love for one another, high incomes, and have had the opportunity to travel widely. Tom's brother and Gerri's friend Mary are aging and alone, undereducated, lacking in the kind of accomplishments that are social currency, living with hurt, and in Mary's case, desperation. The message is not all one way, old friend of the family Ken is also a graduate and yet has not managed to find a place in life either. Scenes in the movie almost exclusively concern Tom and Gerri's catering to this group of friends and family. They deal with the misfortunes of this circle with a mixture of humour, irony, good cooking and alcohol, but mostly conceal their compassion and are helpless onlookers. The mating game is key here, the unwedded 40+s exist in a state of unsalved distress, futureless, scrapped. Even 30-year-old Joe, functional, graduate, well-employed and witty has struggled to find someone to be with. A notable absence in the movie is a sense of solidarity, community, public events, shared lives and shared values. There's an illiquidity in the relationships marketplace, a lack of feeling and connection, all leading to a general anomie and social constipation. However painful the lives of Ken and Mary are, the film gives occasional glimpses of far more infernal lives, lower circles of hell where dissatisfaction has paralysed characters with rage or utter resignation. Anything more than a glimpse would have made the film unwatchable. Gone are the days when WWII veterans would whimper their way through night-times of post-traumatic hallucination for forty years without mentioning it to a soul, however the British "stiff upper lip" still remains as a guiding principle in this movie. There is still very much the assumption that one should keep one's private hell to oneself, or else outsource emotion to a therapist. What may be controversial in the film is the way you look at how Tom and Gerri treat Mary. A German lady in the audience voiced her opinion to Mike Leigh that the way they treated her was to look down on her, and that she felt this was inappropriate. Mike Leigh responded that the lady felt like this because she was a German and Germans did not understand irony. Maybe I suffer from the same problem because I for one felt that Mary was treated as little more than a baby, and with a certain hauteur, arms-length love. I think people who are lonely need to feel useful. Mary for example was never allowed to help with anything, though this does not excuse her, at times, appalling behaviour (depression makes people selfish, however I feel it necessary to point out as well that someone who is drowning in a river and calling for a life ring, is also being "selfish" in the same way, and I think metaphorically the position is very similar). Dour joyless watching, maybe one for the Cabinet to watch, after the example of the film La Haine, which concentrated on French malaise and was screened in front of the French cabinet at the instigation of Prime Minister Alain Juppé.

• An underrated gem

  thelocksmithuk2011-03-06

  Many comments in this forum gave a me a wry smile, none more so than the disappointed Portuguese couple who'd obviously wanted a feelgood movie to sweeten their jolly to London, and the 'Vampires Suck' lady who believes that a film must have a definable plot and ending. Thank God for films which refuse to pander to us while we munch expectantly on our popcorn. This film does NOT offer an uplifting story (or even a plot), or special effects, or a happy ending. Follow the signs to Men In Black instead. Another Year is slow, it's sad (even depressing), and it reeks of personal desperation. But I think it is a hugely underrated gem of a film... if you're prepared to put in the work. It is simultaneously a celebration of fine acting craft and a test of the audience's interpretative skill. It's difficult to think of a more astonishing performance than Lesley Manville as Mary: hers is a slow & excruciating descent from naïveté & painful insecurity to abject, exhausted desolation, from which we don't expect her to return, no matter how much we hope that she will. Her final scene is as haunting and heartbreaking as any which you're likely to see. We know that her hell is probably of her own doing, but it doesn't prevent our pity of her. The central characters Tom & Gerri are generally considered happy, and towards whom unfulfilled family and friends gravitate as if Tom & Gerri's union was life's ideal for happiness. However, this 'ideal' is shown up by the absence of any obvious elation, joy or excitement in Tom & Gerri 's lives, and we are similarly responsive to their characters: we neither like nor dislike them, because their happiness seems attractive to others only as a foil to risky failure, not as something to genuinely aspire to. I think Mike Leigh presents us with several questions and human hypocrisies: Mary's disgust at fellow lost soul Ken is surely a subconscious terror of her own similar failures, and Gerri's general benevolence towards longtime friend Mary is exposed as mockery and patronisation when she's in private. Had Mary's & Ken's situations been rescued by the arrival of their respective loves on white horses we may well have been celebrating the exhilaration of love discovered after life's tumultuous roller-coaster. Then the colourless contentment & smugness which Tom & Gerri offer up as life's nirvana would've been relegated to last-resort mediocrity.

• File under "Too painful to watch twice"

  esie-12011-01-30

  On the surface this is a movie about the day to day life of an elderly, happily married couple (Tom and Gerri), their son and friends, among them Mary and Ken. All seems well in suburban London until that very last shot of the film, a most disturbing scene, the climax of the movie. We see Mary at the kitchen table of her friends and as the conversation passes her by she realizes she doesn't matter to them any more. Worse, we see it dawning on her that she may never have mattered to them at all in their relationship of 20 years. The comparison with her car is inevitable, a vehicle that should have brought her a sense of freedom, but turned out to be a lemon if ever there was one. As another commenter wrote, it is a scene of exceptional cruelty. (Can I nominate Ms Manville for an Oscar, please ?) How could this insincerity, this not-so-mild form of wickedness persist over such a long time ? Perhaps it has something to do with the British fondness of manners, but I think it has to do with work, more specifically in Tom and Gerri's case with having a profession, being a professional. A professional is someone who is applying a set of rules, an algorithm to a standard input to produce a standard output. (What distinguishes a professional from a craftsman is that the input, rules and output are so complex that they defy supervision.) Tom and Gerri are professionals and what they are doing is extending their professional attitude to their personal lives. Their relationship with Mary is professional. Their marriage is dealt with professionally. Their marital bliss is ultimately based on their contentment with the standardized output it produces. Tomatoes anyone ? Contrast this with Ken and Mary. Ken is an alcoholic in bad physical shape. He was once handsome however and has a good heart. His problem is that he questions the meaning of his job, which in his case seems to amount to questioning the meaning of his life. And then there is Mary. Her goal in life is Love, not work, thereby committing the ultimate sin (not making work your life goal that is). Two scenes illustrate the stranglehold work has on our lives (and the importance of it for the movie's theme, I think). In the first an Asian couple is visiting Joe, an old man threatened with eviction and a young woman acting as his interpreter, her ability to help the old man, however, limited to the duration of her lunch break. In the second Carl arrives too late for his mother's funeral, having been stuck in a traffic jam. The funeral couldn't be postponed however, another one was already waiting. So are Tom and Gerri right ? At the dinner table Tom is telling of how he and Gerri met, by chance on their first day in university. This detail hints at the internal inconsistency of their way of life. And of course right at the beginning of the movie there is this session of Gerri with the sleepless patient, an Everywoman. It shows her utterly failing in her role of counselor, her very profession. Mary is indeed looking for love in all the wrong places. At the end of the film you realize that, despite all appearances Tom & Gerri's was such a place.