Anoth­er Year

Anoth­er year, anoth­er Mike Leigh film. It’s a fun­ny thing. Every time you walk into a new movie by the grand­fa­ther­ly film­mak­er, you’re nev­er sure whether you should both­er. Every time the cred­its roll, you’re so glad you did.

With a title that sounds like a tired sigh, Leigh’s film promis­es anoth­er pay­load of the Brit auteur’s well-worn trade­marks: a tal­ent­ed but unsexy cast flex­ing their improv mus­cles in a bleak, talky, slim­line sto­ry about how hard life is. The kind of film you admire but nev­er get excit­ed about.

Watch­ing Anoth­er Year reminds you just how unfair this is on Leigh. Through his work­shop script-sculpt­ing ses­sions, he’s found a way to cap­ture real life (or some­thing like it) in a way few oth­er film­mak­ers in the world can dream of. He’s some kind of cin­e­mat­ic magi­cian, but his films are no trick.

Robert De Niro wouldn’t sur­vive in a Mike Leigh film. They’re not about throt­tled pow­er-kegs of rage, they’re about ordi­nary, real peo­ple – the hard­est kind to por­tray. They’re real­ly about the tiny, pre­cious things in life – the most dif­fi­cult ones to dramatise.

Here, we’re in North Lon­don, in the home of an aged and hap­pi­ly mar­ried cou­ple, geol­o­gist Tom (Jim Broad­bent) and ther­a­pist Ger­ri (Ruth Sheen). They’re not per­fect but they are deeply in love still. Orbit­ing around them are fam­i­ly and friends who are all search­ing for what they have.

Their son Joe (Oliv­er Malt­man) is a tub­by lawyer who’s kind and hard-work­ing but still hasn’t found a part­ner. Child­less divor­cée Mary (Les­ley Manville) is a friend of Ger­ri whose cheery façade fee­bly masks lone­li­ness, des­per­a­tion and a taste for booze.

Like Ozu, Mike Leigh hits you with a left hook. Noth­ing seems to hap­pen, but sud­den­ly it’s all there. The lit­tle every­day moments are actu­al­ly the big things in life – hope, dis­ap­point­ment, love, lone­li­ness, sad­ness, joy, birth, death. They’re all right here as the plot unfolds over the course of four seasons.

Beau­ti­ful­ly, sen­si­tive­ly pho­tographed by Leigh’s long-time col­lab­o­ra­tor Dick Pope, it’s a film with­out a false word: the dia­logue is wit­ty, nat­ur­al, musi­cal, qui­et, quick-fire, sub­tle and very British. Broad­bent and Sheen are beyond won­der­ful, etch­ing their mar­riage with decades of kind­ness, tol­er­ance and under­stand­ing. Manville, mean­while, pitch­es her own turn at just the right side of frazzled.

If any­thing, their per­for­mances are so gen­tle, clear and truth­ful they scarce­ly seem like real act­ing at all. Leigh, com­ing off the back of Hap­py-Go-Lucky, is on a major lat­er career roll here, one that hard­ly requires the embell­ish­ment of awards for us to recog­nise just how impor­tant he is to our country’s film­mak­ing canon.