Film Review: Another Year

Gerri: Ruth Sheen

Tom: Jim Broadbent

Mary: Lesley Manville

Joe: Oliver Maltman

Katie: Katrina Fernandez

Ronnie: David Bradley

Last night I did something I almost never do and may not have done since I stopped watching VHS tapes: I watched the second half of a movie because I had not watched it all the way through the first time. The movie was Mike Leigh's "Another Year," and while many factors contributed to my having turned it off at an hour and 8 minutes last Friday, a prominent one was that I just needed a break from the misery. I have an artist friend who refuses to watch dramas of any kind, and I had a little bit of sympathy for that position during the movie.

"Another Year" tracks a year in the lives of a couple, Tom and Gerri, their thirty-year-old son Joe, and Gerri's divorced friend Mary. Other characters come into the film throughout, each of whose life seems to exist somewhere between Tom and Gerri's blissful contentment and Mary's lonely life of unmet needs. When we first meet Gerri, we see her in her professional capacity as a therapist. She is speaking to an abject woman (Imelda Staunton from Vera Drake), attempting to counsel her out of a depression that has left her sleepless for a year. Gerri, her face a buck-toothed question mark of a smile, asks this woman to remember the happiest moment of her life. To me, this seemed like a cruel question, and one rather out of touch with the reality of despair. As a viewer, I couldn't answer the question myself and any answers I could come up with seemed in themselves reasons to be sad (two weeks in a summer I spent years ago; a moment of achievement that pointed toward the certainty of a future that wasn't certain; another such moment). We next see Gerri in a similar dynamic with her old friend and colleague Mary. Mary is a mess, though when we first meet her, she is a relatively cheerful mess. She is one of those incredibly vulnerable people one meets in life whose crippling lack of self-awareness ensures that she can never solve her problems. She is lovable when we meet her and Gerri, who is clearly indulging her, again feels smugly superior. At that point, my expectations became set that this would a movie about the how the happy Gerri is actually a knot of rage, and soon she will come apart and Mary, at least honest with her unhappiness, will emerge victorious.

This never happens. Instead, as the movie goes on, in the excruciating real-life manner in which Mike Leigh's movies do, the dark and miserable reality of Mary's life becomes increasingly sad and hard to take. She is never going to be the hero of this tale. She is the Blanche Dubois of this universe, and hope as I might that one of the men who wander into the story will become the man who can rescue from her self, she remains evermore and ever less-sustainably dependent not on the kindness of strangers, but on a crumb from its cake: the indulgence of friends. In the film's most excruciating sequence, Mary arrives for a date at Tom and Gerri's, only to be surprised by their son Joe and his new girlfriend, Katie. Mary has a crush on Joe, whom she has known since he was ten. Mary was clearly once a very attractive woman and part of her attraction to Joe seems to be nostalgia for an earlier time in their lives together, when he probably had an adolescent crush on her. By the time he brings Katie home, nothing remains of that crush. It's at this moment that we realize how truly out of control Mary really is - that there is nothing funny about her situation at all. Joe's girlfriend Katie, like Joe himself, is affable to the point of nausea (note: do I just hate the mores of the British Middle Class?), but as we watch Mary sulk and seethe in the presence of her competition, and opine about the many traumas she and her car have suffered recently, it is clear that even Katie is a far more eligible option than poor Mary.

In previous scenes with Mary, I felt myself consciously trying not to identify with Gerri and Tom's outlook on the scene, but it was here, at the dining room table with Joe, Katie, Gerri and Tom, that I finally could not help taking glances at Gerri across the table. Gerri was her most likable in the scene that immediately followed this one, where she and Tom discussed Mary's horrible behavior and when Gerri said that it was "very upsetting," I believed her, and saw that she was a really good person, not just a person pretending to be a really good person.

I wonder if this movie doesn't serve as a kind of Rorschach test to determine one's attitude towards winners and losers. I am sure there are people I know who identified and sympathized with Gerri from beginning until end, but after everything, and maybe because of the mesmerizing performance of Lesley Manville, my alliances never really changed.

I was still rooting for Mary until the very end, when Ronnie, Tom's just-widowed brother turns up as a last desperate romantic possibility. Even as the last final shot lingered on her sad face, and I knew that it was the last shot of the movie, I still found myself hoping against hope that there would be some kind of Woody Allen-esque coda, where we would see that Mary ended up running away with Ronnie to Majorca, where she once worked as a cocktail waitress, and suddenly discovering happiness in middle age. I've never watched a movie that has made me feel more emphatically that the key to happiness in life is simply having someone to be with. Especially in the last shot, as we watch Mary's sad face, listening to Tom's happy story of the seven months that he and Gerri spent traveling the world when they were young and newly in love, I had the sense that what Mary doesn't have in her life is exactly what Mike Leigh and we the audience are giving her at that very moment: we are bearing witness. It seems like so little, but for those who don't have it, it can be everything.