Another Year [DVD]

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

"Another Year" was a mesmerising film that reminded me of the "Play for Today's" of the 1970's. It is based around the lives of a happily married late middle-aged couple, Tom and Gerri, and deals with their relationships with various friends and family members over the course of one single year. Tom and Gerri are content , well adjusted professionals who spend their time working an allotment and hosting dinner parties. However their friends are not so stable and responsible. We meet the memorable Mary , a lachrymose,desperate neurotic who clings to Gerri as she finds herself unable to cope with her loneliness and growing old. She has an inappropriate crush on her friend's 30 year old son, Joe , fondly imagining them becoming an item , a fancy that is destroyed with the introduction of Joe's new girlfriend , the lovely ,perky Katie. We meet the equally lonely and sad Ken , a sweaty , overweight drunk whose interest in Mary is cruelly rebuffed. He too faces an old age on his own ,alienated from the world around him. All of the characters in this film are ordinary people living ordinary lives and they all are portrayed wonderfully by this excellent cast. "Another Year" is a film for adults that you rarely see any more. The cinemas are mostly full of cartoons , CGI action movies, rom coms and slasher films now and this film is a welcome change from all of that.

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