Another Year

In "Another Year," the medium-functioning alcoholic played by Lesley Manville zigzags through life shooting resentful, paranoid glances in pitiless close-up, while everyone around her enjoys themselves and each other and the seasons passing.

Actors relish the moment when the mask drops and a character's illusions turn to ash, comically or cruelly.

Mike Leigh's films depend on such moments more than most. Think, for instance, of Manville and Jim Broadbent in the masterly "Topsy-Turvy," in the late scene when everything missing from their characters' marriage suddenly sees the light of day before retreating into silence again. More recently: In Leigh's "Happy-Go-Lucky," Sally Hawkins' insistently cheery schoolteacher meets her Waterloo, a sociopathic driving instructor played by Eddie Marsan.

At a crucial point violence is threatened and the man must be talked down from a metaphoric ledge. Hawkins, without missing a beat, becomes a different person for a few seconds. Then she's back to her old self, more or less, but different than before.

The despair is less explosive but more prevalent in "Another Year," the writer-director's latest. Like all Leigh's films this one features some of the best actors in Britain working in a register so comfortable, it's hard to imagine anyone else playing any of the roles. Manville, a longtime Leigh colleague, gets the showcase part, the emotional have-not who we see in contrast to the serenely happy couple portrayed by Broadbent and Ruth Sheen.

Leigh depicts engineering geologist Tom (Broadbent) and medical counselor Gerri (Sheen) as in step with all the good things in life. They spend many content hours at their community garden, enjoying the fruits and vegetables of their labor. They enjoy their wine but not too much. Both have fulfilling steady careers. They are, in Gerri's words, "very lucky" -- a soothing utopian ideal of couplehood.

"Another Year" contrasts these two with outsized representations of addled pathos. Tom's friend from the old days, played by Peter Wight as a blustery heart attack waiting to happen, comes to London for a visit, drinking, smoking, drinking more, spilling his not-inconsiderable guts about his loneliness. Manville plays Mary, a longtime colleague and friend of Gerri's, similarly unfulfilled and addictive in temperament. Mary has an unseemly crush on Tom and Gerri's son, Joe, an amiable 30-year-old (Oliver Maltman). The comic dread Leigh creates when Mary meets her perceived romantic rival (the delightful Karina Fernandez as Joe's girlfriend) is at once delicious and merciless.

For all the warmth emanating from the film's core, thanks to Broadbent and Sheen, I don't know if Leigh has ever made a crueler picture. "Another Year" affords Mary and Ken little but comic pity and emotional suffocation. Is Leigh saying happiness is simply a matter of luck? Will? Brain chemistry? Alcoholic intake? Finances? There's a streak of unexamined smugness running through the film's attitudes. Gerri, like the audience, becomes fed up with Mary's chaos and whining and self-torture ("Why do I always spoil everything?" Mary spits out at one point). "You have to take responsibility for your actions," says Gerri to Mary, in a superior way. Tom and Gerri's enabling tendencies, meantime, go unexamined.

So I'm conflicted about "Another Year," yet the actors more than compensate. What we have here is a collision, an engaging and often moving one, of characters and caricatures. Leigh has long understood the strategy of letting an actor loose upon an extreme personality, and then stripping that portrayal down to the bone. Sometimes it's riveting. Sometimes it's false. And sometimes it's both.

 

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"Another Year" Movie Trailer

 

MPAA rating: PG-13 (for some language).

Running time: 2:09.

Cast: Jim Broadbent (Tom); Lesley Manville (Mary); Ruth Sheen (Gerri); Peter Wight (Ken); Oliver Maltman (Joe); David Bradley (Ronnie); Karina Fernandez (Katie); Martin Savage (Carl).

Credits: Written and directed by Mike Leigh; produced by Georgina Lowe. A Sony Pictures Classics release.

 

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