Mike Leigh follows a contented London couple and the lonely people drawn to their kitchen over a year, and it is among his best. Lesley Manville’s Mary is unbearable and heartbreaking at once; our reservation is how sure Leigh is about who is to blame.
Mike Leigh has made angrier films than Another Year, and noisier ones. He has not made a kinder one, or a sadder one, and the two turn out to be the same thing. Tom (Jim Broadbent) and Gerri (Ruth Sheen) have been married a long time. He tests soil for a living; she counsels patients at a doctors’ surgery; they grow vegetables on an allotment and cook them. The film watches them through spring, summer, autumn and winter and asks a simple question: what happens to the people around a couple like that? We would send most people to see it, with the caveat that nothing in the usual sense happens.
It opens on Imelda Staunton, who has perhaps five minutes as Janet, a patient who cannot sleep and will not say why. Asked to score her happiness out of ten she says one, and Staunton plays it without a flicker, as though the question were an insult. That is the pitch of the whole film. Then Mary arrives. Lesley Manville plays Gerri’s colleague from the surgery as a woman in her fifties who talks as if she is running to catch up with her own sentences, laughs before the joke has landed, and holds out her glass while insisting she is only having the one. She is going to buy a car. The car is going to change everything.
Dick Pope shoots each season in its own colour: the spring allotment a wet, cold green, the summer garden yellow and overexposed, the autumn a dull brown, the winter drained almost to grey. He does it without announcing it, and it is only afterwards that we noticed the year had gone by in the light. Simon Beresford’s kitchen is the film’s real location, cluttered and warm and not especially tidy, the sort of room people come back to. Jacqueline Durran puts Mary in short skirts and heels a decade too young for her and puts Gerri in shapeless cardigans, and the difference says most of what needs saying. Gary Yershon’s score is a thin, mournful line of woodwind and strings that comes in between scenes and stays out of them. Jon Gregory cuts slowly and holds long, particularly on faces.
The dinner in spring is where the film had us. Mary, well into a second bottle, explains her plans to Tom and Gerri while they exchange the smallest of glances over her head. We laughed, and then we felt ashamed of ourselves, because Manville lets you see, under the chatter, a woman who knows exactly how she is coming across and cannot stop. Peter Wight’s Ken, who turns up in summer for a barbecue, is her male equivalent: overweight, drinking, crying into a garden chair about a job he hates. The scene in which he makes his feelings known to her, and she makes hers known to him, is as painful a piece of comedy as Leigh has staged.
Our reservation is Tom and Gerri. They are good people, patient and generous, and the film never once wonders whether their patience might be its own kind of distance. Every lonely person in it is measured against their kitchen and found wanting, and the scheme, happy couple at the centre, miserable singles at the edges, is tidy enough to notice. Oliver Maltman’s Joe is pleasant and slightly blank until Karina Fernandez arrives in autumn as Katie, his new girlfriend, who is so cheerful that Mary can barely look at her. A few critics have complained that Leigh pushes the camera too close to Manville too often. We half agree; there is a shot near the end that holds on her longer than we could comfortably bear, and we suspect that was the intention.
The last season brings David Bradley as Tom’s brother Ronnie, who arrives late and says perhaps forty words in total, and Martin Savage as his son Carl, who says too many. We will leave the circumstances alone. It is enough to say that the film’s final movement is its best, and that Bradley, sat at the kitchen table with a cup of tea he has not asked for, does more with a stare than most actors do with a speech.
It runs 129 minutes and carries a 12A, and it is not a film for a night when you want cheering up. Watch it with someone you have known a long time. You will find yourselves counting, afterwards, how many of your friends still come round.
