"ANOTHER YEAR" - THE FILM

"Another Year" is a strange movie. Written and directed by the much admired Mike Leigh, the film received a number of glowing reviews, yet a quarter way through watching, I wondered what the movie was about. At the end, I asked myself the same question.

Were the names of the two main characters, Tom and Gerri, intentional?  Both Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen play their roles as Tom, a geological engineer, and Gerri, a counsellor, a middle-aged happily married couple, well and naturally, with Broadbent's performance outstanding in excellence. Tom is plainly a nice guy, but Gerri's character is annoying to the point of insufferability, seeming smug, all-knowing, and insular as she observes the disastrous lives surrounding her, even as she offers the characters kindness and hospitality.  Oliver Maltman is very good and natural as their son, Joe.  Tom and Gerri's daughter, mentioned in passing, seems not a steady presence in their lives.

To enjoy a movie, I must first suspend disbelief and accept the characters as real people for the duration, but several of the characters were caricatures who were not at all credible.  I wondered how it was possible for the couple's friend Mary (Lesley Manville), with her overplayed shrinking, cringing, and gesturing, to ever pull herself together enough to function in her job as a receptionist.  Then there is sad Ken (Peter Wight, also overplaying his role), as their miserably unhappy friend with whom the couple try to link the miserably unhappy Mary, but she's having none of it, and who can blame her?  What a miserably unhappy pair the two would make.

Enter son Joe's long-awaited (by his parents) fiancée, the giggly, squirmy, gesturing Katie (Karina Fernandez), whom both Tom and Gerri agree is lovely and just the girl for Joe.  Please.  To be in the same room with Mary, Katie, and Ken all at once would try my patience to the utmost.  Though it doesn't happen in the film, viewers are painfully subjected to two at a time.

Oh my.  I sound grumpy even to myself, but, in the end, what this viewer is left with are four seasons in the lives of Tom and Gerri showing the couple's kindness and hospitality to the less fortunate, yet all the while remaining self-contained and self-satisfied throughout.  Director Leigh most certainly does not fear moments of silence.

Three intriguing characters appear only briefly: Janet (Imelda Staunton), an unforgettable picture of depression, whom Gerri counsels at the beginning of the movie and who never again appears; Ronnie (David Bradley), Tom's brother, whose blunt and steely gaze is stunning throughout his nearly wordless performance which begins at his wife's funeral; and Ronnie's son Jack (Philip Davis), a study in anger, barely and, at times, unsuccessfully repressed.  Strangely enough, Mary and Ronnie seem to connect in a way that is believable, but I shuddered at the thought of the havoc Mary'd wreak should she became part of Ronnie's life.
 
Please don't simply take my word on the quality of the film, but read at least some of the words of the 93% of critics and the 74% of audiences who praise "Another Year".