Review: Another Year
Tom (Jim Broadbent) and Gerri (Ruth Sheen) are thoroughly content. They enjoy an idyllic late-middle-age intimacy, get on with their successful grown-up son, maintain a cosy home and an allotment garden. They work rewarding jobs, cook wonderful meals, and never drink too much. Mary (Lesley Manville), Gerri’s colleague and a longtime family friend, is chronically discontent. She is lonely and unfulfilled, dislikes her job, detests her flat (it reminds her of how unmarried she is), and drinks more than she should. She is shrill, self-absorbed and inconsiderate in company. Tom and Gerri care about her, despite it all, and they tolerate her misbehaviour. She covets their attention — and of course she envies them. This clash of personalities is at the centre of Mike Leigh’s Another Year.
Why is Mary unhappy? Her specific dissatisfactions are not convincing as explanations of her misery, because she’s obviously not committed to resolving them. There is the suggestion, I suppose, that past disappointments may have damaged her appetite for self-awareness and personal development, but I don’t think Leigh is all that concerned with the whys and wherefores of her situation. Quite simply, people like Mary exist, people who define themselves by what they don’t have. The genius of the film is that it brings Mary into the ambit of Tom and Gerri, her polar opposites in luck and temperament. They have worked hard, and they have been blessed by providence, but more importantly they are grateful for every ounce of their experience. Once again, it’s not important to know why this is so.
Another Year is a loose and meandering film, though too keenly-observed to be boring. As the title suggests, there’s nothing special about the particular year we’re shown. The film could have been set the previous year, or the following, and felt more or less the same. There is a birth, a death and some reversal of fortune, but no extraordinary dramas. Indeed, many of the more “dramatic” incidents occur offscreen. Rather than a catalogue of crises and transformations, then, this is a portrait of profound stasis. As in Leigh’s harrowing Naked, the happy here stay happy and the sad stay sad. If the film weren’t so conspicuously bare of religious motifs, I’d be tempted to call its outlook eschatological.
The shift that does occur, I think, is not in the characters but in our attitudes toward them. When I saw Another Year, I felt an immediate attachment to Tom and Gerri and a strong antipathy towards Mary. Leigh and Manville’s depiction of this childish woman is forensic (almost sadistic), and at first she seems something of a bad joke. As the film goes on, though, Mary becomes the dominant presence. In the film’s final moments, the sound drops away as the roving camera settles on her face, teary and forlorn. It’s a devastating image. Mary is no joke.
Partly because of this structural sleight-of-hand, my sympathies have changed over time. I now feel a stronger affinity for Mary than I do for Tom and Gerri. I envy the happy couple as she does, and even vaguely resent them. They are well-meaning, sure, but do they ever genuinely empathise with their troublesome friend? Why not try to do more for her than give her a seat at the table and a glass of wine?
Mary’s life is her own responsibility, of course, and Another Year is not some moral tale of self-satisfied winners maliciously refusing to share their spoils. Rather it challenges the value of an atomised happiness, a happiness that won’t spread. Tom and Gerri have a beautiful life, but if those around them are struggling (not only Mary but Tom’s bereaved brother, his bitter nephew, and his grotesquely despondent friend Ken), what good is their contentment? Yes, it’s not Tom and Gerri’s responsibility to “fix” their friends and family — and they do offer what support they can — but Another Year slowly transforms their joy from an object of affectionate jealousy to an ambiguous, maybe dangerous phenomenon. Their prosperity makes them feel better, but it seems to make a lot of people around them feel worse.
