Mike Leigh’s Another Year is a subtly intoxicating, beautifully acted tragicomedy in four seasons. It leavens the gentle, humanistic poetry of Rohmer and Ozu with a more Chekhovian, humour-dappled sense of uncertainty and melancholy, the embers of which glower throughout the film. Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen are Tom and Gerry (a fun touch which is nicely underplayed), a middle-aged couple who adore each other, enjoy their jobs and have a lovely relationship with their grown-up son Joe (Oliver Maltman). Their cosy home, however, has become a sanctuary for bruised souls, most notably Mary, a jittery, amiable, superficially cheery but profoundly lonely work colleague of Gerry's. Mary attempts to douse her frustrated self-awareness in fragile laughter, hollow self-assurance, booze and, most poignantly, emotional promiscuity; she flirts inappropriately (with Joe, with Tom, and later with Tom's laconic brother Ronnie, played brilliantly by David Bradley), as though, like Anne-Marie Duff’s sexualised mother figure in Nowhere Boy, it is the only way to talk to men with which she feels comfortable. It is a wonderful, agonisingly convincing performance from Lesley Manville, a textured study of modern frustration and a dappy cousin, of sorts, to the brittle, vinegary female roles Woody Allen used to write so well for the likes of Dianne Wiest and Judy Davis.
Some critics have reproached the latent smugness of Tom and Gerry as characters, suggesting that they surround themselves with the forlorn to feel better about themselves. It is an interesting interpretation, and one of many ambiguities with which the film is strewn, but Tom and Gerry's warmth is perhaps too passive for the charge to hold up: they seem to invite the likes of Mary and Ken out of polite sympathy and genuine compassion rather than any premeditated, self-serving hope that they will appreciate their own happiness more. But it's a measure of Leigh's characterisation and the performances he draws that one cannot be sure either way. Indeed, in an increasingly flighty cinematic age, thank God for Mike Leigh, who has favoured his peerless repertory of character actors (Broadbent, Staunton, Davis, Marsan, Manville) over big-name casting and preserved the humility, wit and perspicacity of his early writing; in many ways, Leigh's characterisation has improved as he has got older (the opposite to Mr Woody Allen, whose Attractive But Troubled leads, not to mention the protean Banquo's ghost of the neurotic Woody Allen persona, have become half-arsed, charmless parodies of themselves). The broader caricaturist brushstrokes of Life Is Sweet and Leigh's early plays (even the masterful Abigail's Party) have been replaced by more nuanced portraits, exceptional illustrations of the unexceptional.
Perhaps the element most worthy of praise in Another Year is the (often simultaneous) blend of the comic and the tragic, a quality that I genuinely think puts the film right up there with Chekhov and Arthur Miller. Like the magnificent funeral scene in Ken Loach's Riff Raff where Robert Carlyle's family struggle with the contraption containing his mother's ashes, there are moments of exquisite humour in the saddest circumstances; for instance, David Bradley's memory of the year his and Tom's mother died is heartbreakingly funny. The scene at the wake, shot with the crisp dark tones and mirror imagery of an Edward Hopper painting, is the closest the film comes to the climactic outpouring on which the rhythm of a Mike Leigh piece often hinges (Timothy Spall's cathartic diatribe in Secrets and Lies; Eddie Marsan's violent outburst in Poppy's last driving lesson in Happy-Go-Lucky). But it never quite comes, even from Martin Savage's bitter leather-clad Carl, and the pathos is all the tenser for the restraint.
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