Film: Another Year

Mike Leigh's spirit of improvisation, realism and emotional investment continues in 'ANOTHER YEAR'; a deft, touching, meandering work that explores themes of loneliness and support in a group of ageing friends and family over the course of one year.

Tom and Gerri (Jim Broadbent & Ruth Sheen), are a married couple, seemingly the exception that proves the rule that finding love and happiness is a difficult, stressful and often fruitless task. Gerri is an occupational therapist, and throughout the film her house is transformed in an unofficial sanctuary for the lonely and depressed. This is most clear when one of Gerri's colleagues, the scatty and delusional Mary (played with show-stealing desperation by Lesley Manville), continues to return to the house, drinking herself into a stupor, flirting with the couple's son, Joe (Oliver Maltman), and pouring her heart out about love, loneliness and her troublesome new car.

Though Mary's character is the main focus of much of the film, and it is through her that Leigh can provide some resemblance of narrative arc, there are other characters in the story that move in and out of Tom and Gerri's lives and ultimately all contribute to the film's bigger picture. Ken (Peter Wright) is a crumbling man, drinking and smoking with abandon and a figure from Tom and Gerri's past, the history that is inevitably in danger of being left behind. Katie (Karina Fernandez) arrives as Joe's surprise new girlfriend, and quickly makes Mary bitterly jealous and competitive. Ronnie (David Bradley) is Tom's brother who, when his wife dies, is reunited with his volatile and hate-filled son, Carl (a tension-boosting cameo by Martin Savage). All of these characters show us the complexity of life outside of Tom and Gerri's comfortable London home and carefully tended allotment, it shows us that there is life that needs tending to above the ground, just as much as there is below it. In this sense 'Another Year' could be said to be a film about caring in all of its forms; for others, for the earth, for ourselves.

What Leigh does in his approach to film-making is gather together a group of actors who are intelligent, extremely talented, and who he trusts to develop characters outside of his immediate control. The result is a cinematic equivalent of devised theatre, a sort of mural that encapsulates and represents a number of creative voices and themes. It has a rambling effect, but one that is painted with such a natural palette that small looks and gestures become hugely meaningful. On occasion there are moments of stagnant theatricality, where dialogue seems to become formulaic, but then often there are passages of brilliant wit and camaraderie between the actors and characters that is thoroughly and almost achingly touching.

One thing that cannot be said of 'Another Year' is that it is superficial. Though not a ground-breaking or particularly revelatory piece of story-telling, it is nevertheless an expertly performed cinematic delicacy, and a heartfelt and personal project by a long-standing pillar of British film-making deserves to be seen merely for its existing at all.