DCist’s highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
Mike Leigh, fresh from the success of an uncharacteristically bright and optimistic film, 2008’s Happy Go Lucky, dials down the optimism a great deal and retreats into a more melancholy mood with Another Year. Leigh regulars Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen star as Tom and Gerri, a middle-aged, middle-class, well-adjusted, pleasant London couple around whom revolve a series of friends an relatives with bottomless wells of problems. Over the course of “another year,” the couple host these loved ones at dinner, tea, and wakes; they’re the calm eye where these people feel they can go to take refuge from the storms outside.
Chief among them is Mary (Lesley Manville), an alcoholic, depressive wreck who works with Gerri and regularly gets loaded at their garden parties before hitting on their grown son, Joe. While there are other sad souls on display here — Peter Wight as another alcoholic old friend, Ken, and David Bradley as Tom’s recalcitrant brother Ronnie — this is Mary’s story more than any of the others. And over the course of the film, we see Tom and Gerri’s patience increasingly tested by her, as she requires more and more attention, even as the couple is dealing with tragic personal matters.
This is typically dense work from Leigh, who offers up characters who are all flawed in complex and deeply human ways. While the flaws in those that orbit around them might be more obvious, there seems a subtle critique here of over-polite British bourgeois mores. Mary may be miserable, but at least she puts all her cards on the table. Tom and Gerri are often too gracious to tell their guests what they really think, preferring to offer condescending platitudes as they shepherd them through their problems. The knowing glances they throw at each other when Mary or Ken screw up yet again can seem smug and self-congratulatory, and holding the couple up as a false ideal is, I believe, one of the sly geniuses of the film, rather than the cloying deficiency a few critics have declared it. This is, like most of Mike Leigh’s work, an insightful, knotty film about messed up people stumbling through life; don’t let the fact that two people among them seem to have all the answers fool you into thinking that Leigh believes they really do.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at E Street, Bethesda Row, and Cinema Arts.
