Review: Another Year (2010)

                                 

As much as I love and admire a great deal of the work of Mike Leigh there are aspects of his films that can generate a special kind of irritation. Though adored in some quarters, Leigh’s last work, Happy-Go-Lucky (2008), appeared to grate on the nerves of a substantial number of viewers, particularly those who found Sally Hawkins’s irrepressible Poppy to be more annoyance than inspiration. Despite contrived and problematic moments (the unconvincing scene between Poppy and the tramp; the poorly executed subplot involving the abused boy at school), Happy-Go-Lucky struck me as a fresh and engaging addition to Leigh’s canon, with superb performances from Hawkins and Eddie Marsan at its centre and well-drawn supporting characters filling out the background. I certainly found it to be a much more insightful and enjoyable experience than the director’s new film, Another Year, which is out this Friday and appears to be receiving pretty much universal acclaim. I saw Another Year at the London Film Festival a couple of weeks ago and it’s taken me quite a while to process how one of my most anticipated films at the LFF - and one that many people are celebrating as a Leigh masterpiece - ended up being one of the Festival’s biggest disappointments for me. This rather lengthy review attempts to assess why.


Opening in Spring, Another Year presents episodes from twelve months in the life of a thoroughly contented London couple, Tom (Jim Broadbent), a geologist, and Gerri (Ruth Sheen), a therapist, and their circle of family and friends. Principal among these are their son Joe (Oliver Maltman), Tom’s lonely chum (Peter Wight), Gerri’s work colleague Mary (Lesley Manville), and Tom’s brother (David Bradley). Over this year, Tom and Gerri work on their allotment, meet Joe’s new girlfriend, and go north for a family funeral. But the movie’s focal point gradually becomes the emotional unravelling of Mary, counter-pointed with the happiness and stability of the couple.

A problem with Leigh’s weaker films is that they can be too transparent in their attitude towards their own characters, too doctrinaire in guiding the audience’s perceptions as to who we’re meant to admire, pity, or what have you. (His best films, in contrast, work to challenge and subvert such pre-judgements.) This kind of obviousness proved to be one of my barriers to enjoying Another Year. Like some of Leigh’s earlier work, it’s a film that doesn’t allow the audience enough space for interpretation. Gerri and Tom are made such beacons of good-humour and tolerance that there’s no doubt about how we’re meant to respond to them, and the contrast set up between their happiness on the one hand and their friends’ miserable singleness on the other comes off as far too stark. Tom and Gerri (even the cuteness of the naming makes you wince; or does it hint at conflicts that never made it onto the screen?) are the latest in a line of sentimentalised couples in Leigh’s cinema and the director’s ringing endorsement of their wonderfulness couldn’t be clearer. (We observe their affection but none of the tensions - overt or underlying - of a long-married couple. Nothing, apart from their sad and sometimes disruptive single friends, is shown to ruffle their composure.) At the  Q&A that followed the screening that I attended, another audience member expressed the opinion that the pair might be viewed as “insufferably bourgeois.” Leigh reacted with incredulity to this suggestion, but I think that’s just how some viewers might respond to Tom and Gerri, with their full fridge, Edenic allotment, affectionate repartee, bedtime snuggles, and warm hugs for those less fortunate than they. If you don’t find the pair as delightful as they’re intended to be, you may have problems with the ways in which Another Year develops.

Performance is a central pleasure of Mike Leigh movies, and that’s the case in Another Year - but only up to a point. While it’s exciting, even moving, to see a cast so full of Leigh veterans in one film - in addition to the principals there’s a cameo for Imelda Staunton, a killer of an appearance by Martin Savage and a (too minor) role for Phil Davis - I’d argue that they’ve done better, subtler work elsewhere. Manville is a superb actress whose performances for Leigh in Topsy-Turvy (1999) and the underrated All or Nothing (2002) are among my favourites of all time. (I even cherish her brief appearance as the social worker in Secrets and Lies [1996].) But though she hits some very affecting notes here (especially in a fine, long late sequence that she shares with the great David Bradley, and that’s worth the price of admission on its own), a lot of what she does in Another Year seems over-stressed to me. (I admit that my response may have been affected by the reaction of the audience at the LFF screening who shrieked with laughter at almost her every utterance.) Hapless, manless, childless Mary (and childless women often seem to pose a problem in Leigh’s cinema), with her drunken binges, her bad driving, her insecurity about her age and refrain of “It’s not fair!”, follows a familiar Leigh trajectory from figure-of-fun to object-of-pity. The character hasn’t been in the film for five minutes before she starts wittering about her singleness; her humiliation is complete by the end of her second scene in which she’s eyeing a man in a bar before discovering that he already has a date; an over-familiar scenario if ever there was one. She’s a direct descendant of the similarly intrusive, needy and clingy Gloria (Brenda Blethyn) in Leigh’s TV film Grown Ups (1980) and a few Blethyn-isms creep into Manville’s characterisation, it must be said. Close-ups capturing every twitch of Mary’s envy, defensiveness and insecurity rob the performance of nuance in some scenes. I found myself wishing that the camera would just back off and allow us to intuit the character’s emotions instead of constantly signposting them. I came to feel the same about the other actors at times too. Broadbent’s jovial mateyness, Sheen’s even-voiced serenity, Wight’s desperate food-guzzling, Bradley’s terseness - they all begin to seem a bit overdone. The characters that Leigh and the actors have worked up here are vivid creations, as ever, and yet I wasn‘t always convinced by them, somehow.

The seasonal structure of the film has lead to comparisons with Ozu and Rohmer, and Another Year’s concern with coupledom, the challenges of change, ageing, caring, and family dynamics also makes that assessment apt. (Dick Pope’s cinematography captures the seasonal changes with unobtrusive elegance, though the setting of the funeral in the "Winter" section seems another over-obvious touch.) But the schematism and obviousness of Another Year make it seem far removed from these directors' best work. Gary Yershon's score ladles on the wistfulness and, when in doubt, Leigh has the characters state the themes. “Change is frightening, isn’t it?” muses Sheen in her opening encounter with Staunton. Later, when sympathising with Mary, she notes “Life isn’t always kind, is it?” Never has a therapist seemed more reliant upon clichés and homilies but it gradually becomes apparent that Gerri’s every remark is meant to have the weight of truth. A scene that exemplifies this tendency is the one in which Joe’s girlfriend, Katie, is introduced to the couple. Played by Karina Fernandez (she was the highly-strung flamenco dance tutor in Happy-Go-Lucky), the character comes off as a chirpy, endlessly bantering nightmare, a Poppy redux. But when Gerri announces that “She’s lovely” there’s meant to be no doubt at all about the accuracy of the judgment. Instead the scene becomes about the pitifulness of Mary’s infatuation with Joe and marks another predictable step in the character’s downward spiral.

I’d love to be able to be more enthusiastic about this movie. Leigh can be a wonderful director and his best films have put aspects of British life on screen in recognisable, funny and honest ways. There are fleeting moments of acute observation in Another Year, but the movie represents one of the few times that I think Leigh’s method might have misfired: the film doesn’t develop in enough interesting directions. Joe agreeing to date Mary might have given the proceedings the kick they needed and shaken the film (and Tom and Gerri) out of their complacency. But such a development would have taken Another Year in a crazier, less banal direction than Leigh seems prepared to go this time around. The film’s limited, conventional and even conservative approach to issues of human fulfilment is unappealing, and seems in contrast to the expansiveness, the richness and texture, of the director’s finest work. (Compare the suggestiveness and discretion of the emotional content of Claire Denis’s Ozu riff, 35 Shots of Rum [2008], with the obviousness of much of what’s on display here and the movie’s shortcomings become all the clearer.) A significant disappointment for me, then, but I look forward to reading other bloggers’ responses to Another Year.