Mike Leigh lends a steady hand and a careful eye and ear to Another Year, a tone-perfect, life-affirming film that ranks among his best work and evokes the gentle spirit of Yasujiro Ozu. It’s a quiet, disarmingly “normal” film filled with characters we seem to already know, and situations that seem to arise naturally rather than manufactured by a screenwriter, dictated by the characters’ lives, shaped by their personalities.
The film is separated into four segments: Spring, Summer, Fall, and Winter. This timeline alone gives you some idea of where the film is headed. Leigh takes a different stylistic approach to each season, altering his color palette and the composition of shots; his characters also follow seasonal cues. I was often reminded of the use of seasons in Ozu’s films (Late Spring, Early Summer, etc.), and Kim Ki-Duk’s Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… and Spring.
Spring introduces us to therapist Gerri (Ruth Sheen), her geologist husband Tom (Jim Broadbent), their attorney son Joe (Oliver Maltman), and family friend Mary (Leslie Manville). Gerri, Tom, and Joe are remarkably calm and collected; they’re happy, throughout the film. Mary, on the other hand, who smokes and drinks heavily and wants to buy a car in order to give herself freedom, is up and down along with the seasons; by the time Winter comes around, we fear the worst.
Other characters show up and seem to accentuate the seasons: Tom’s overweight, hard-drinking friend Ken (Peter Wight), his frail, mourning older brother Ronnie (David Bradley), Ronnie’s confrontational son Carl (Martin Savage).
We’re only given a snapshot of each season: a brief weekend visit, where characters meet, eat, drink, and talk. Not much seems to happen. But we watch carefully, and with a bird’s-eye-view, we carefully examine these characters, what they think of each other, their position in life, in society. By the end, we’ve watched life carry them through another year.
Leigh’s films are sometimes divisive (I had some issues with his previous, the appropriately-titled Happy-Go-Lucky, and the treatment of its main character), and he poses a lot of questions without giving any easy answers. Tom and Gerri are good people, yet they seem to watch their friends (Mary, Ken) destroy themselves without attempting to interject.
Leigh allows Tom and Gerri, and Joe and his eventual girlfriend Katie (Karina Fernandez), to be happy, while we watch the other characters struggle in life; have they achieved happiness? Have they been rewarded? Or are they just naturally content?
What a joy it is to watch a film filled (mostly) with characters who behave like adults, calm and collected, people who we feel comfortable sitting around and listening to. There’s a charm, and humor, at work here that feels incredibly natural. We’re even willing to accept Mary and Ken – warts and all – as old friends.
Most of the attention for the film has fallen to Manville, who gives a showy, tic-filled performance as the emotional Mary, with a face that can always be read like a book; she’s fine in the role (and a final, lingering shot gives the character extra weight), but the rest of the cast is at least equally good.
Widescreen cinematography by Leigh’s usual cinematographer, Dick Pope, beautifully captures these characters, with frequent use of close-ups. Music by Gary Yershon perfectly suits the material.
