Another Year

Another week, another film: Another Year. However, acclaimed British director Mike Leigh’s latest offering isn’t the kind that is released every day; it is a beautifully observed film that exudes warmth and humour despite the sense of isolation and depression that lies at its heart.

The film, as the title suggests, follows a year in the life of Tom (Jim Broadbent) and Gerri (Ruth Sheen) – a long-married couple, on the cusp of retirement, whose relationship is far healthier than that of their cartoon namesakes. In fact, their middle-class, suburban existence is ideal: they have well-paid jobs they love; they spend weekends pottering in their allotment and their 30-year-old lawyer son Joe’s (Oliver Maltman) singledom is of little concern.

But the film isn’t about them. Not really. It’s about the less perfect lives of their circle of friends – of Gerri’s co-worker Mary (Lesley Manville) in particular. Mary is an old friend of the family, but they can find her scatty nature and wine-habits a little trying. However, from the first time we see Mary get hopelessly drunk when visiting Tom and Gerri, we can see how alone and vulnerable she is. The string of unhappy relationships she lists clearly hurt all the more when she looks at the perfect marriage of her friends.

Whilst Manville’s manic portrayal of Mary is a little incongruous with the more understated performances of Sheen and Broadbent, it is no less compelling. Her crest-fallen expression when she learns that Joe, who she sees (rather ambitiously) as a potential love interest, has a girlfriend is as heartbreaking as it is hilarious. Her subsequent cold treatment of said girlfriend, Katie, leads, as we learn later in the film, to Mary being frozen out by the family. It is the ultimate irony that Gerri, despite her job as a counsellor, can be so unsympathetic to her friend and fails to notice her depression. It is because we see so much more than Gerri, with close-up shots of Mary’s hurt face constantly asserting her fragility, that we continue to offer her sympathy when her friends don’t.

Inevitably, with the film broken down into four parts, winter heralds a gloomy climax. When the family head up north (where else would you locate such grim scenes?) for Tom’s sister-in-law’s funeral, the change in the film’s tone is instantly noticeable, when the previous seasons’ warm glow is replaced by a pervasive palette of greys. When Tom’s grieving brother Ronnie returns home with them, it sets up one of the film’s most moving scenes. When an upset and apologetic Mary finds Ronnie home alone, she meets her vulnerable match. The scene between motor mouth Mary and the all-but-silent Ronnie floats between the poignant and the painful, but is utterly compelling regardless.

Overall, Mike Leigh certainly gives precedence to characters over narrative. The thin and sporadic narrative of the film is given a fittingly imperfect ending. Yet this is all part Leigh’s wish to paint an accurate picture of life – it’s the old cliché that there is no such thing as a happy ending. This does not negate, however, from the terrific successes of the film. Another Year is rife with humour and wit, and Leigh creates a range of characters that you truly care for. Ultimately the film is not a study of the loving and harmonious married couple that the film foregrounds, but of the peripheral figures who, like Mary, have to spend another year unnoticed.

See Another Year at City Screen.

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