Another Year

Or, I'm afraid "Another Mike Leigh Film."

Mike Leigh makes films in a very odd way. He recruits a bunch of actors he trusts, and brings them in with a basic idea of the characters, and where he wants the plot to go, more or less, and the lot of them improv and workshop it out, until the actors live their characters, and the plot grows naturalistically and organically out of the actions the actors feel their characters should take.

This has two effects, it seems. First, you'll see some of the best acting and characterisation in cinema. Second, you've got a plot that doesn't necessarily go in an interesting direction, or indeed any direction at all.

Here's your setup. You have an old married couple called Tom and Gerri, played by Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen. They have a moderately successful, cosy, and very happy life. They also have family and friends who are, by comparison, a collection of emotional basket cases. Most notably, a work friend of Gerri's called Mary, played by Lesley Mannville, who is an incredibly needy, twitchy, twittery woman, and Tom's friend Ken, who is an overeating, alcoholic ball of utter misery, bitterly disappointed with how his life basically failed to happen.

Now, in a scripted, plotted film, you might expect this to turn into a story of these two unhappy people finding each other and supporting each other. This film will have none of that. Mary's too shallow to see past Ken's rough exterior, rejects him, and then for some reason we don't hear from him again for the rest of the film. Mary then steals much of the focus making a fool of herself on a regular basis, to no great outcome other than to make herself more miserable.

I can see what's happened here in one sense. I feel like some strongwilled actors have fought to make their characters behave as realistically as possible, with the overall effect that the events of the film are all too believable; that is, people who are stuck in a rut fuck up a lot, and thus remain stuck in a rut. Hence, perhaps the title "Another Year" - the film is twelve months of people basically ending up precisely where they started, only a little older and sadder.

Now, I am old fashioned enough to think that if the events of a year are unremarkable, you don't point a camera at them. You film the moments of change, moments of crisis. I am reminded of that runaway train movie "Unstoppable" last month. In many ways, Tony Scott is no Mike Leigh. But one thing Tony Scott does know is that if Denzel Washington's character had a twenty-five year career shunting goods trains, and then one day had to chase down a runaway train, that's the day you film. And you don't film his mate who was off sick that day.

Obviously, this film is far from without value. There's not a performance in the piece that isn't brilliant. Lesley Manville steals the show by playing an utterly believable, incredibly irritating, clingy and neurotic woman. And if you can bear watching it, watching her fall apart at the seams, it's an incredible performance. But overall, I found myself wishing for a much more solid core of plot, to give us a reason to be watching this woman, without which it felt more like voyeurism.