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Another Year Review
01 Nov 2010
Critics rating: 3 stars out of 5
Reviewed by Tom Charity , LOVEFiLM
Another Year

Mike Leigh's latest is another inner city London slice of life, this time loosely centred on the happy home of Tom (Jim Broadbent) and Gerri (Ruth Sheen).

He’s an engineer, she’s a counselor at Social Services. They have a jovial 30-year old son, Joe (Oliver Maltman), still single, and a small coterie of miserable friends, including the alcoholic Ken (Peter Wight) and Gerri’s colleague Mary (Lesley Manville), a divorcee who’s desperately trying to ignore the shambles she’s made of things by throwing herself at men and drinking too much - not necessarily in that order.

 I don’t think it’s been acknowledged explicitly but Another Year feels like a belated companion piece to Leigh’s 1988 film High Hopes, which also starred Ruth Sheen as a salt of the earth working class type, enjoying impoverished domestic contentment with a laidback Marxist, Philip Davis. (Davis has a small role here too.)

Serious filmmakers – artists in general – rarely find happiness a very interesting subject, and happy couples tend not to occupy centre stage. There’s a reason for that, and while Sheen and Broadbent are enormously sympathetic, Leigh’s conception of the couple struck this viewer as irritatingly smug and complacent.

They’re there as a merciful counterpoint to the wretched lonely souls of their aging friends of course, but what bothers me about this is the dual standards Leigh applies: the characters he likes are afforded respect and compassion, an observational style that is to all intents and purposes realistic, while those he doesn’t approve of are etched in caricature.

Lesley Manville was also in High Hopes, as a shrill, obnoxious yuppie. Although at first the role here seems subsidiary, her performance dominates Another Year. There is serious talk about an Oscar nomination – though whether she belongs in the category for best actress or supporting actress is still up for debate.

The performance is remarkable, I suppose, but for me it wrecks the film. The line between great and bad acting is always tricky – one reason that great actors stand out is because they risk being terrible.

Peter Wight, Lesley Manville

For me, Manville falls on the wrong side of that line. Mary is one of Leigh’s tragic-comic grotesques, less an individual than a compendium of mannerisms and behavioural tics. She’s chirpy and upbeat, flirty and fun-loving – but utterly transparent. It’s in Manville’s second or third scene that she gets embarrassingly drunk at her friends’ house and spills her guts about her deep loneliness and misery. Aside from Manville’s barely believable drunk act, the sequence leaves the character nowhere to go except further over the top. By the climax, she shows up at Gerri’s house in such a manic state it’s surprising no one calls a doctor. Manville’s scenes are too pained to be funny, but too exaggerated to be moving – at least that’s how they struck me.

Likewise, that excellent actor Peter Wright (so good in Babel) is encouraged to pitch his role as the embodiment of the t-shirt he wears in one scene: “Less Thinking, More Drinking”. Leigh does write a moving scene between this sorry chap, Peter, and Jim Broadbent’s concerned friend, who tries to offer him a lifeline. But the scene would have been so much better if both actors were allowed to dig beneath their superficial character notes.

For the most part Another Year is too cut and dried to offer genuine epiphanies

Broadbent’s nuanced gestures at a family funeral offer more grace notes. But here too, an ugly interjection from a supporting character threatens to derail the film entirely – a third act character who comes out of nowhere and disappears almost as quickly. It’s the sort of thing Hollywood screenwriting manuals warn you against, and while I’m wary of giving them credit, “Another Year” highlights the reason why this unwritten “rule” exists.

The movie’s structure, such as it is, is based around the four seasons, and will have film buffs scratching for Rohmer and Ozu comparisons – intended, I’m sure, Leigh is himself an art film fan. In brief moments his film has some of the warmth we regularly find in the work of those masters. But for the most part Another Year is too cut and dried to offer genuine epiphanies, too sure of its platitudinous “wisdom” to leave room for learning.

Another Year Reviews

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