SUCH is Another Year: as suffused with harmony as a great work of Asian art, alive with the wit and compassion that have made Mike Leigh a master director of comedies; the serious exceptions, like Naked and Vera Drake, prove the rule.
It’s a study in dichotomy: an aging, hard-working couple in the suburbs of London contrasted with the life of their high-maintenance friend Mary (Lesley Manville). Mary is on the downward spiral; the incline is slight at first but unignorable eventually.
In a sense, Tom and Gerri both work in the public-health business: He (the ever-jovial Jim Broadbent) is a structural engineer working on an expansion of the antiquated London sewer system; she (Ruth Sheen) is a psychological counselor at a clinic. In a community garden, lovingly photographed by Dick Pope, the two spends time off from their work digging, weeding and reaping.
Four times over the course of a year, this likable pair have some people over for wine and dinner; their grown son, Joe (Oliver Maltman), introduces a charming girlfriend at one of the evenings. Ultimately, the family leaves for a trip back to Tom’s old neighborhood after a death in the family. The constant in all these dinners is Mary, who progresses from a welcome guest to a friend in constant need.
Essential to this film’s humanity is Broadbent’s gregariousness. He’s quite subtle in the craft of displaying degrees of welcome and warmth. I can remember guessing the punch line of The Crying Game early on, just because of the slight extra friendliness Broadbent put into his role as a pub keeper. It wasn’t what he said out loud (“You’ve just entered a gay bar”) that gave us the news.
The beaky, comical Sheen is a treat no matter how little chance we have had to see her on the big screen since Leigh’s High Hopes (1988), the best movie ever made about a woman wanting to have a baby.
A prostitute in Fargo called Steve Buscemi’s character “funny looking,” and when asked to explain what that means, she repeats it: “You know, funny looking.” Sheen has that funniness—like Buscemi, a quality of amusement and shrewdness, and the vivacity that makes conventionally pretty people look pudding-faced. When she moans about her middle-aged spread, the passing remark rings like an Eric Idle quip.
Karina Fernandez, who supplied some superb dialect comedy in Happy-Go-Lucky (she was the flamenco teacher, raving about infidelity), is similarly delightful as the charming girlfriend—in one key scene, she pantomimes suicidal anguish at the news that Mary has crashed a dinner party.
There’s another startling face in the film: the sepulchral David Bradley (famous as Hogwarts School caretaker Argus Filch). He plays Tom’s newly widowed brother, refusing to admit his own loss. He’s there to underscore Leigh’s own wonder at how happiness isn’t hereditary.
Another Year‘s glancing four-seasons approach doesn’t turn the film into a series of sketches. Far from it. The theme of the transitory nature of happiness is well served. It takes so little to make happiness flee: chronic bad luck that you can’t laugh at; a little substance abuse, maybe; too much pride and prejudice; inability to take the long view.
If Another Year is a four-paneled study instead of a wide canvas like Secrets and Lies, the figures are deep and well conceived, perhaps idealized but not sweetened. Somewhere there must be husbands and wives in such perfect accord—somewhere, fathers and sons with such cordiality, respect and a touch of necessary distance.
The true sweetness of Tom and Gerri’s life is not really apparent until the last monologue. The perfect couple is a “nation of two,” in Kurt Vonnegut phrase in Mother Night. What we see in this marriage is more like a world of two. Manville’s acting, absolutely wounding to watch, shows what it’s like to be an exile from that wide world. There’s genuine horror in her desperation. It’s like watching a woman freeze to death in front of us.
PG-13; 129 min.
