Getting a small cohort of humanity dead right is an impressive artistic achievement, but Mike Leigh’s beautifully modu lated English drama “Another Year” advances even farther. It illuminates profoundly in matters of class, age, family, friendship, economics and even nationality.
A tremulous Lesley Manville, as fragile and quivering as a one-winged sparrow, is superb as Mary, a medical secretary for Gerri, a kindly psychiatrist (Ruth Sheen) who frequently welcomes Mary to her suburban London home for dinner. Tom (Jim Broadbent), Gerri’s geologist husband, treats Mary with twinkling good humor that carries a slightly condescending tone.
Mary, a gulping wine drinker once very pretty but no longer young, doesn’t quite fit in as well as she thinks with this
upper-middle-class couple, whose 30-year-old son Joe (Oliver Maltman) is a legal-aid lawyer. But Gerri is professionally understanding of spirit, and Mary doesn’t seem much to mind (or even notice) when her older friends treat her as a daffy little sister. She is given to amusing but painful malapropisms, like this one about the reason she thinks her interactions with potential suitors are dwindling: “When they find out I’m not as young as I look, they don’t want to know.” They do want to know; what they don’t want is to date her.
Mary’s casual questions about the handsome Joe become a little too insistent. She overhugs him. It becomes evident that she thinks his lightly mocking banter constitutes flirtation, and the movie is a story of her acquiring an education against her will.
Leigh’s clarity and honest (not contrived) naturalism make ordinary behavior fascinating. He observes how even verbally gifted people fend off unpleasantness with cliché (“Just one of those things,” says Tom, about his nephew’s abhorrent behavior at a funeral), and why people laugh — usually out of camaraderie or nerves, not necessarily because anything funny has happened. His actors, particularly Manville, are perfection. She so completely inhabits her character, as Mary reels off blathering wine-fueled monologues full of automotive woe and romantic tribulation, that to watch is to wince. But never to disdain.
Despite the film’s studied Englishness, it perhaps carries even more meaning on this side of the Atlantic. Would a professional American couple get so mixed up with the affairs of this dejected lower-middle-class tippler? I doubt it. The socioeconomic gap would be vast, because an American couple with advanced degrees would be much wealthier. Here, psychiatrists are rich. There, amid nationalized medicine, they’re basically upper-tier civil servants.
Every character is in one way or another getting taken care of by the government, whether indirectly (Tom scouts out foundations for proposed public-works projects) or, as in the case of Tom’s emotionally arthritic 70-year-old brother Ronnie, simply living on the dole forever. Sixty-five years of mild socialism has had the intended effect of much social leveling in Britain, and brought with it a permanent funk, a sense that dreaming big is best left to those wacky Yanks. Ronnie, being “free from the tyranny of regular employment,” as jolly Tom puts it, is also free from ambition or engagement with the world. His sole passions are football and beer, but he can’t afford football tickets anymore.
Leigh doesn’t even allude to these economic questions. He doesn’t have to: When you know your characters so well, they become as fascinating as real people. Yet few documentaries could hope to catch their subjects so off-guard, or to chance upon completely believable dialogue with such haunting echoes. The prattling, desperate Mary tells the widower Ronnie, “It’s really lovely to have someone to talk to,” though he has said virtually nothing. When she says, at the end of a scene, “Can’t go on like this, that’s for sure,” we know she is wrong. The resonance is with Samuel Beckett’s “I can’t go on.
I’ll go on.”