Another Year (Two-Disc Blu-ray/DVD Combo) (2010)

Tom is a geologist, at the start of the film, checking drill core to ensure strong foundations for coming construction. Gerry is a medical counselor, gently attempting to help her clients tend to their lives. Both are gardeners who know that you can have almost anything you want, provided you plant the seeds and take the time to tend and direct their growth. Their reward is shared time together and a bountiful harvest freely shared with others.

Mary, a middle-aged secretary at Gerry's office, knows none of this.

She repeatedly comments on Tom and Gerry's "luck" but is clueless about its source. She has no interest in others beyond finding the perfect man who will love her and even cook for her. She doesn't cook for herself or others (replacing food with alcohol)and besides, it's so much easier to go home to Tom and Gerry's where she is cared for. She even imagines a romantic relationship with their son, half her age, who she used to babysit, and is shattered (and unspeakably rude) when he brings his girlfriend home to meet the parents.

She buys a wreck of a car imagining that it will make her even more free from responsibility (in this case, train schedules) but has no clue how to care for it or even what its needs might be. At a garden party, where she imagines her mechanical difficulties to be the main topic of interest, she completely fails to notice a co-worker's new baby.

Yes, Mary is unlucky, much like the profoundly depressed insomniac woman at the very beginning of the movie -who has only two brief appearances. So why is SHE there? Because in another year or two or three, that will be Mary. She is the harvest.

There are no entertaining shoot outs or car chases here, and the only monsters are real ones. This is a quiet meditation on real life, the foundations and the seeds and patterns of growing and dying that we put in place through our own choices and desires and their consequences. Sadly and beautifully and brilliantly done.

If "Another Year" comes off as unsatisfying, perhaps that's a testament to director Mike Leigh's affinity for depicting real life as it naturally unfolds. The movie doesn't have much of a plot, but it does have a strong sense of character, believable dialogue, and a definite theme, namely that life simply goes on. It's about ordinary people with ordinary problems; they may initially seem otherworldly, but they become more real as the film progresses, and by the end, we feel as if we've known them for years. This isn't to suggest that we automatically like all of them. You can understand a person and still think they're better suited in someone else's company. The film doesn't offer a lot in the way of resolution, but then again, neither does life, so I guess there's no sense in complaining.

Taking place in England, the center of the story is Tom and Gerri (Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen), and before you ask, yes, they get the occasional joke about how their names are pared. They're in their autumn years and have been married a long time. They're perfectly content; Tom is an engineering geologist, Gerri is a counselor, and after some years of travelling, the two now enjoy gardening and harvesting vegetables. Their thirty-year-old son, Joe (Oliver Maltman), hasn't yet found a girlfriend but is about as content as his parents. They address each other simply and don't seem to have any issues with one another. We follow them through the course of four seasons as they interact with friends and family, who all seem to suffer from some degree of unhappiness.

The most prominent is Gerri's coworker, Mary (Lesley Manville). At first, she's a comical figure, a woman who can't seem to stop talking and always nurses a glass of wine. With every passing scene, she becomes more and more tragic until we realize that she's a desperately lonely alcoholic in serious need of professional help. She has known Joe since he was ten, and now that he's a man, she finds that she's incredibly attracted to him. He doesn't feel the same way, but he never avoids her; in fact, there are times when he makes it a point to have a conversation with her. And, when he finally does get a girlfriend, he isn't afraid to introduce her to Mary, who, as you can probably guess, is crushed. She realizes that she wasn't ready for her first marriage. She finally fell in love in her thirties, but it was to a man who ultimately divorced her and left her with nothing. At this advanced stage in her life, she just wants someone to talk to.

Mary's life is symbolized by a used car she purchased with what little money she had stashed away. We never see it fall to pieces, but there are a couple of densely worded scenes in which she rants about the mechanical problems, the break-ins, and the financial woes they entail. She's a terrible driver and gets lost quite easily, even on routes she has successfully walked many times. She relies a little too often on take-away food, since she's not much of a cook and hasn't dated anyone who would take that responsibility. She says in an early scene that she's happy to be independent, but the fact is, she wants to be taken care of. Gerri addresses her just as simply as she does her husband; if she considers Mary a friend, then I find it peculiar she didn't make more of an effort to get her help. She is, after all, a counselor.

Other characters are introduced. Some are written out much sooner than we'd expect them to be, begging the question of why they were included in the first place. Consider Tom's friend, Ken (Peter Wight), who's aging, overweight, a smoker, a drinker, and being dragged into retirement kicking and screaming. He realizes, with depressing clarity, that he doesn't want to take the train back home, for there's absolutely nothing there waiting for him. He's attracted to Mary. She most certainly doesn't feel the same way about him. The most curious character is Janet (Imelda Staunton), who appears in exactly two scenes as a clinically depressed insomniac unwilling to partake in Gerri's counseling. When the film was over, I was certain that nothing would have been lost had this character been eliminated.

A more substantial but equally subdued subplot is introduced later in the film, when Tom attends the funeral of his sister-in-law and invites his brother, Ronnie (David Bradley), to stay with him for a couple of days. Ronnie's son, Carl (Martin Savage), is an undependable hothead who I suspect was that way long before the death of his mother. Ronnie and Mary eventually have a conversation, although Mary does most of the talking. Is this her story? It might seem that way, especially since she's the subject of the final shot. Still, I have a feeling that "Another Year" isn't anyone's story in particular. Friends come and go. Families get together and separate. People live, people die seasons change. I grant you that this isn't a particularly fulfilling message. But this is a movie about the mundane, about still frames in people's lives. You see this movie, and then you move on.

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Life isn't sweet for the characters of Mike Leigh's new film, and it's not happy-go-lucky either.

"Another Year" is, in short, another Leigh film about normal folk living ordinary lives. And yet, of course, it's about so much more.

It's about an allotment for one thing a small parcel of land lovingly tended by geologist Tom (Jim Broadbent) and his medical counsellor wife Gerri (Ruth Sheen).

It's also about a car: a dysfunctional little runaround that Gerri's lonely, wineslugging co-worker Mary (Lesley Manville) buys in the futile expectation it will open up new horizons.

It's about Tom's chum Ken (Peter Wight), a boozy, overweight sadsack. It's also about Tom's older brother Ronnie (David Bradley) and their respective sons: one a wry community lawyer (Oliver Maltman), the other an angry, volatile malcontent (Martin Savage).

Family and friends, children and parents, siblings and colleagues. Split into four parts, each one focused on a different season, Another Year has a formal, Eric Rohmer-esque structure that makes it one of its creator's most ordered works.

Yet the middle-class suburban milieu it shows is anything but, the lottery of humanity having blessed Tom and Gerri with married contentment and saddled the likes of Mary, Ken and Janet (a despondent patient of Gerri's, memorably played by Imelda Staunton) with disappointment and misery. Why do some luck out and others miss out?

You won't find an answer to that conundrum in Year. But you do see what happens when the two collide, Mary's inappropriate crush on Maltman's jovial Joe coming a cropper when he arrives for tea with a perky girlfriend (Karina Fernandez) half her age.

Manville is teriffic here, her pinched mouth and teary eyes conveying the anguish of a woman who's just had her last illusion shattered. Yet so too is Sheen, her benevolent compassion turning steely at the merest hint of her brood being threatened.

Throw in Broadbent's chipper, gently mocking patriarch and you have three of the finest performances ever to grace a Mike Leigh yarn. No mean feat from the man who gave us Naked, Vera Drake and Secrets & Lies.

Meantime, long-term Leigh collaborator, cinematographer Dick Pope, elegantly transports us from spring through to winter with a such graceful fluidity that one easily forgives the film's occasional longueur.

Leigh's take on life's rich tapestry its smiles, its frowns, its ups and downs is second nature to us now. Yet he's still made Another funny, perceptive, moving human drama. Neil Smith

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If you love character films, "Another Year" is the film for you. Granted, even for a British film, it seemed rather slow for most of the first half but I couldn't stop watching---the characters lured me immediately and persistently.

Lesley Manville plays Mary: a very pretty and exceedingly lonely woman who tries painfully hard to create a life for herself. The depths of her despair but valiant effort to be happy is paralleled by her best friend Gerri, played perfectly by Ruth Sheen. Gerri and Mary have worked together for twenty years. Gerri has always initiated kind and regular invitations to Mary to come to dinner.

Gerri and Tom (played by the brilliant Jim Broadbent) have a mature and loving ease to their marriage of so many years. They are solid realists. Their compassion for their friends and family is equal, their acceptance for a broad range of people in their lives is not only notable but admirable. They have a great heart each and melded together as a couple. Mary has had a tough time of it and it is apparent to the audience that she needs Gerri.

As she and Tom have always invited Mary to dinner for twenty years, Mary has also watched their son grow up---who is now thirty and still single. Mary has a gift for "getting ideas" about things that are not always true. She's a bit naive and therefore foolish---yet generally harmlessly so. Until one night....

Mike Leigh (writer/director) carefully develops---no, allows his characters to evolve---through ordinary, daily living that as each character's desires come more into focus, they also come into conflict with the desires of others. This drives the story to bring these relationships to a troubling climactic point: Mary's loneliness and deluded need to belong is more than awkward when she meets Joe's (played sweetly by Oliver Maltman) serious girlfriend when he surprises his parents by bringing her to dinner one night. While everyone "understands" Mary is quirky, no one foresees how toxic her pain has become. Nor how protective Gerri can be of her family.

Has Mary finally overstepped her bounds? Will Gerri and Tom turn on her afterall? Has she lost her best friend Gerri forever?

Other characters enter the story to fill out these three who are the pivotal characters. The film is tender and haunting. These characters will hold your attention and your heart.

It would seem that popular culture is spinning out of control with hypersensitivity to a frenetic need to be in touch with everyone---fast, furious, superficial hydroplaning relationships. Thank God for Mike Leigh. This film is human, rooted, stable, real in its depiction of how beautiful and calm life can be, and how each of us longs for friends like Gerri and Tom. Some of us even wish we could be them. We still need to slow down, to touch the earth, to touch each other, to linger in the presence of those we love.

It's not a feel-good movie, but it is hopeful and satisfying. The characters are so distinctive and memorable. I hope everyone involved receives the recognition they deserve for this meaningful collaboration.

See the film.

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It is not very often that we have the opportunity to view a film about real people. People with flaws, people who are not movie star handsome, people we know, like our neighbors, our inlaws, our children. Mike Leigh has written and directed this superb film about these people.

Tom, played by Jim Broadbent, and Gerry, played by Ruth Sheen live in North London. They have been married for years, happily married, even. They have a son, Joe, played by oliver Maltman, who loves his parents and seems to be a perfectly normal young man. He is looking for a soulmate and feels the pressure from his parents, at times. Gerry is a therapist. For thirty years she has worked with Mary, superbly played by Lesley Manville, a secretary who has porblems. She wants the perfect man who will never be available, and she drinks too much to get her through her day. She has glammed on to Tom and Gerry. Their home is a warm, inviting place, and they are not judgemental. After a perfectly hideous evening of too much drinking and obvious jealousy of Joe's new girlfriend, Tom says of Mary, "It's Sad" That really says it all. A family funeral portrays a funeral like no other, but does point out the foibles we see in other families, and sometimes our own. All this time, going home to Tom and Gerry's is the best place to be. Tom and Gerry love their friends and family and support them, through thick and thin. We see much of the thin in this film, but that is real life.

Mike Leigh has given us a film where we feel embarrassment, amusement and sadness. This is real life, folks. We all know folks like this and maybe it is us. We are peeking into the lives of people who have foibles and we can learn from their predicaments, and from the manner that Tom and Gerry deal with life and with these folks they welcome into their lives. This is a film that gave me a sense of joy, that good folks like Tom and Gerry abound. Life is not all about the beautiful people making too much money and getting into too much trouble. We are, after all, all too human.

Highly Recommended. prisrob 06-12-11

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