ANOTHER YEAR
***1/2
DIRECTED BY Mike Leigh
STARS Jim Broadbent, Ruth Sheen
A character in a ’70s movie — Gene Hackman’s private eye Harry Moseby in Night Moves, if we’re pointing fingers — opined that watching an Eric Rohmer film is like watching paint dry. I imagine similar charges have been lobbed against the oeuvre of British writer-director Mike Leigh, whose idea of an action sequence is having his characters sit down on the couch or pour themselves a cuppa.
Yet as he has repeatedly demonstrated in such gems as Life Is Sweet, Secrets & Lies and Topsy-Turvy, Leigh is a master chronicler of the human experience with all its magnificent trappings and imperfections, an intuitive filmmaker whose hands-on approach with his actors (whom he allows to largely improvise) has yielded some dynamic results. Another Year is a disarmingly straightforward drama about happily married couple Tom and Gerri (Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen) and the family members and friends who pass through their lives over the course of four seasons. Chief among these acquaintances is Mary (Lesley Manville), a middle-aged woman whose loneliness causes her to drink too much, complain too loudly and go too far when she starts to view Tom and Gerri’s grown son Joe (Oliver Maltman) as a viable partner. Other visitors include Joe’s vivacious new girlfriend Katie (Karina Fernandez), whose mere presence devastates Mary, and the strikingly unfit Ken (Peter Wight), whose ability to eat, drink and smoke all at the same time is as fascinating to behold as it is frightening to contemplate.
To state that the film has no real plot is to miss the point completely: The characters are the plot, weaving enough personal detail through the narrative to provide us with plenty of back story, present circumstance and even future incident. Never cynical about the bitter truths it packs, this all-embracing endeavor also has the distinction of featuring at its center a husband and wife who are comfortably, irrefutably in love — a point worth noting in this era in which family dysfunction is all the rage on screen.
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This article appears in Feb 8-14, 2011.
Glad you spelled it out for us by telling us the characters were the plot because I felt like another year of my life had gone by. Snooooozefest. However, it was shot beautifully, I loved the scenery on the golf course, but at the end I was really like…. who is Linda? And, I really wanted to know what happened with the lady in the beginning, why couldn’t she sleep, what happened to her?
“Art” cracks me up.