Mike Leigh's Another Year

I am quite resistant to Mike Leigh's work. He is an actor-based director and I think the acting is sometimes excessive. Also I find he often prescribes too strongly what we should think about his characters, leaving me too little room to work out my own response. Like quite a few people I've spoken to I couldn't stand Happy-Go-Lucky because the main character was over-cooked and implausibly irritating.

Another year is better and as I watched it in a preview I was thinking that the critics would give it four or five stars, which most of them did. The film is structured around a professional couple approaching retirement age, and their adult son, and the film largely concerns two family friends. In the course of the film the son acquires a girl friend (who has more that a touch of the Happy-Go-Luckies). Leigh's films reverberate with his work generally and he often uses the same actors in several films. This film starts with a scene, only tangentially connected to the rest of the film, featuring Immelda Staunton, who starred in Leigh's Vera Drake (unseen by me). This scene seemed like a gesture of friendship from Leigh to Staunton, so she wouldn't feel neglected. After this the film has four scenes corresponding to the four seasons, and each scene is a sort of snapshot of these characters. For those into allotments this is a good film. The film is largely about Mary, played by Leslie Manville. She is a work colleague of Gerri, the female half of the professional couple, and she is going through a drink-fueled mid-life crisis where she moves from seeing herself as an attractive, single woman to a middle-aged woman past her prime, with old-age fast approaching. You either think her acting is great or you think it distracts from responding to the character. It is definitely show-case acting. The other satellite of the professional couple is Ken, who's situation is not so dissimilar to Mary's, although he probably is way beyond thinking of himself as attractive. He is unhappy and unfulfilled, and eats and drinks immoderately in ways the film makes it impossible to misinterpret or ignore, shoving the camera in his face as he drinks beer, wine and eats crisps. He is overweight. He makes a rejected pass at Mary. For me he is the least satisfactory character because he is drawn with such a lack of subtlety .

The other half of the professional couple is Tom, played by Jim Broadbent, who is one of those actors everyone hastens to say they like (just as everyone hastens to say how much they hate Titanic!), and he is capable. Tom has a brother Ronnie, who enters the film after his wife dies, and we go to the funeral, which is one of the film's best scenes, and Ronnie is one of the more successful characters, maybe because he seems to be catatonic with shock at his wife's death, and doesn't have much to say, or act. Then Ronnie moves in with Tom and Gerry and there are some conversations between him and Mary, in which we see Ronnie slowly re-connecting with life.

A problem I have with Leigh's work generally, and it applies here, is the lack of dramatic impulse. Some of the film is moving, but one doesn't really wonder what will happen next. It is almost the cinema equivalent of a still life. There is a fault line in the film between the professional couple, who are stable and happy, and appear to have no doubts or problems, and their satellites, who have all the problems and doubts. I don't really know why the doubts and problems couldn't be more evenly spread, unless Leigh was making a class-related point. One might ask who is changed by the events of the film? The couple's son acquires a girl friend, although this happens outside of the film and isn't dramatised. Ronnie's wife dies, again outside of the film, and his angry son appears out of the blue at the funeral. Ken discovers that Mary doesn't fancy him. Mary hunkers down for old age and spinsterhood. The professional couple sail on. Something, but not much

All this is recounted in a slow and thoughtful way which it is hard to dislike and easy to respect. Well, one flippant journalist said it seemed like Another Ten Years. I don't agree.