Another Year is about the turning wheel of life, an examination of the pleasures and jealousies, disappointments and insecurities, destroyed dreams and rekindled hopes that make up our daily existence. It may sound commonplace, but in the hands of master filmmaker Mike Leigh, the everyday becomes extraordinary.
The film is also further proof — if proof is necessary after six Oscar nominations for writing and directing, a Palme d'Or and a best director award from Cannes, and a Golden Lion from Venice — that Leigh's explorations of human psychology are on a level of their own.
Using a particular method of working with actors that thoroughly involves them in creating characters from the ground up, Leigh goes deeper into individuals than one would have thought possible. The people he and his cast create in this joint venture combine depth and complexity with a kind of unstudied naturalism, so much the better to make audiences complicit in their lives.
The three actors who are the focus of Another Year — Jim Broadbent, Ruth Sheen and an indescribable Lesley Manville — are all veterans of multiple Leigh ventures, and it's a special pleasure to see them finding their places in this new situation.
After a stunning opening vignette featuring Imelda Staunton, Another Year introduces its central figures of Tom (Broadbent) and Gerri (Sheen, in an especially subtle performance). They are a sane and stable longtime married couple, he is a geologist, she a mental health counselor, and together they form an island of steadiness and dependability, underlined by their passion for gardening, that everyone they know clings to and admires.
No one depends more on these two than Mary (Manville), a co-worker of Gerri's who's been a family friend for close to 20 years. Mary is a little frantic from the first moments we see her, a flighty, live-wire individual who seems to have too much energy for her own good. We notice this but, like Tom and Gerri, we let it go because, well, that's just the way she is.
Another Year is broken up into four sections, each named after a season. Though Tom, Gerri and Mary appear in all of them, each season has its own particular narrative line.
Summer brings a visit from Ken (Peter Wight), an old childhood friend of Tom's. Though the motto on Ken's T-shirt ("less thinking, more drinking") indicates a possibly dissonant lifestyle choice, the two remain close enough for a wonderful impromptu moment in which Tom jumps on his pal's shoulders.
Against all reason (isn't that always the way?), Ken finds himself attracted to Mary, with unsettling results. Even more against reason, autumn brings an intensification of what had seemed a harmless romantic crush on Mary's part, with even more unsettling results.
The mood darkens in winter, when a funeral brings Tom and Gerri to Tom's childhood home, where his brother Ronnie (a marvelous David Bradley) is coping with his wife's death.
It's inevitable that some of these individuals have more screen time than others, but Leigh's methods ensure that there are no small parts in these films. When Leigh says, as he did in Cannes, that "I practice a craft that can't be copied," this is what he's talking about.
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