Mike Leigh (2010)
After watching Mark Lawson’s BBC4 interview with Alison Steadman and reading Nick James’ Sight and Sound piece with Mike Leigh and Lesley Manville, I still don’t understand what Leigh’s ‘process’ for developing characters and situations with his actors amounts to. But whatever it is, it delivers here a continuously bracing film, one of Leigh’s best. Another Year comprises four sections – spring, summer, autumn, winter – although the age and circumstances of the main characters mean that the mood is mostly autumnal. The film’s title is multivalent. There’s the simple passage through the seasons, the sense of a year negotiated with gains and losses, the awareness of death getting closer.
The people and their ways of life in Mike Leigh films have, for many years, claimed validity because they’re recognizable. His intention often seems to have been to confront us with the familiar to make us recoil from it (perhaps with laughter). There are plenty of excruciating social moments in Another Year but the tone is often benign. Watching the secure domestic routines of Tom and Gerri, the pivotal characters, is reassuring, even heartwarming. The couple have one son, Joe; the love within the family is communicated effortlessly. The parents also have an allotment: the symbolism – il faut cultiver notre jardin – is conceptually obvious but it doesn’t come over that way, thanks to Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen’s acting. (Mike Leigh evidently sees Ruth Sheen as someone who makes things grow – her character in High Hopes was a gardener too.) Unsurprisingly and pleasingly, the allotment scenes are lovely too as illustrations of the changing seasons (the framing of the shots suggests paintings). It’s been good to see Leigh’s cinematographer Dick Pope being allowed in recent films to light urban and suburban London in a beautifying way. Leigh also now conveys a straightforward admiration for people trying to do socially valuable jobs: the community solicitor Joe; Tanya, a GP; Gerri, who’s a counsellor in the same practice; Joe’s girlfriend Katie, an occupational therapist. Tom is a geological engineer: as Gerri explains to Katie, ‘he digs holes’. (The relatively brief scenes of the characters at their places of work are unforced and very right.)
Mike Leigh looks to be mellowing without going soft. It’s hard, for example, to imagine the Leigh d’autrefois showing men playing golf in anything but a spirit of scornful antipathy. When Tom and Joe take on two of Tom’s friends in a round of four balls the writer-director seems to be enjoying the mixture of intense competition and fooling about as much as anyone. Tom’s and Gerri’s marriage has lasted without, as far as we know, major problems; their experiences are, on the face of it, unremarkable. Putting their life on screen and making it absorbing to watch is no mean feat. Yet even a film-maker as experienced and self-confident as Leigh is evidently aware of the commercial risks of undercooking things. You understand why he decided that Another Year needed some conventional dramatic highlights. So the main couple’s friend Mary pours her heart out at the climax to ‘Spring’; gets involved in a grim pas de deux with Tom’s friend Ken, down from Hull for the weekend, in ‘Summer’; displays envious, flagrant hostility towards the romantic parvenue Katie in ‘Autumn’. There are family arguments at the funeral of Tom’s sister-in-law in ‘Winter’. These outbursts, although they’re played well, aren’t organic in the way of the less emphatic, more subtly observational passages of the film. Leigh also appears to think that he needs a ‘dramatic’ performance to animate proceedings and Lesley Manville’s Mary – because she’s emotionally volatile and so more evidently various than the others – is made the star of the show. Manville gives a fine performance – there’s a real traction between the character’s brittleness and the actress’s particular expressivity – yet it isn’t fully satisfying. I never lost the feeling that Manville was doing a turn (a very detailed and skilful turn) – perhaps because Mary’s nearly indiscriminate man-hunger gets to be almost a running gag. (What does work very well in the performance is the character’s indeterminate age. Manville is fifty-four but there’s still something girlish about her, poignant now that she’s clearly far from young.)
In the final sequence, Tom, Gerri, Joe, Katie, Tom’s bereaved brother Ronnie and Mary are eating together at Tom’s and Gerri’s home. The two couples are chatting to and with each other, reminiscing easily. The camera moves slowly round the table, first to Ronnie then to Mary. He is silent but much less miserable than when we first saw him, happy to be enjoying a good meal and listening to his family. Mary feels excluded and Leigh, to stress her solitude, muffles the sound of the others’ voices as the camera settles on Mary’s face (echoing the moment in The Kids Are All Right when the Annette Bening character, dining in company, is stunned into a world of her own). Another Year stops at this point and the ending – because of its implication that the film has been the story of Mary (rather than of Tom and Gerri) – sounds an unsettling note. There is, however, an obvious symmetry between this closing shot and the face of another unhappy woman which opens the picture. That woman is Janet, visiting the doctor because she can’t sleep. A little later, Janet is with Gerri, who’s recommending an appointment with a therapist colleague, but we don’t see Janet again. We don’t find out either what’s wrong exactly but something Janet says to the GP stays in your mind. Asked what one thing would make her feel better, Janet replies, ‘A change of life’. It’s as if Mike Leigh is saying, ‘There are a lot of unhappy people about. Janet and Mary are two of them. I could have chosen to tell you the story of Janet’s unhappiness but I chose Mary’s instead’.
Leo Robson’s hostile review in TLS wonders what Leigh was thinking introducing Mary in ‘Spring’ then Ken, comparably miserable and too ready to drown, then sound off about, his sorrows, in ‘Summer’. I had problems with the neatness of the scheme: Mary and Ken are two apparently kindred spirits but whereas he fancies her she can’t bear the sight of him. The arrival of Mary, characteristically flustered but overbearing, at a barbecue chez Tom and Gerri is well observed in the variety of politely distancing effects that Mary has on her hosts and, except for Ken, on the other guests – like the GP Tanya (Michele Austin), now on maternity leave and there with her new baby (whom Mary ignores). When Mary explains to Gerri how unattractive she finds overweight Ken, it’s one of the more inventive takes on her desperate avidity because she makes it sound as if any man is inherently fanciable – and that she can neither understand nor forgive Ken for making himself repulsive to her. But the polarisation of the two lonelyhearts’ feelings about each other is overdone and the climax to this section, when Mary grudgingly gives Ken a lift to King’s Cross and he makes a clumsy pass on their arrival there, is too obvious for the actors to redeem. Still, Leigh comes close to doing so with the sadly beautiful shot of Ken’s train speeding its way back to Hull. We heard Ken, in Tom’s and Gerri’s garden, anticipating the bleakness of his journey home. Leigh has the taste to show just the exterior of the train – he doesn’t need to show us the man inside it.
‘Winter’ starts with a trip north for the funeral of Tom’s sister-in-law, Linda. Her husband, Ronnie, seems stupefied, helpless. He and his son Carl get on so badly that Carl was estranged from both his parents – his loathing of his father trumped his feelings for his mother. He arrives late – just as the coffin’s gone behind the curtains at the crematorium. Afterwards, he gets angry in the car park outside. Carl’s last-minute appearance is nearly a sitcom moment but what follows is well judged – especially in the way that Gerri and Tom prevent the crem equivalent of graveside family spats so familiar in screen funerals and which nearly always seem unlikely on an occasion when people are primed to keep their feelings in check. Then the family – augmented by just three other mourners – return to Ronnie’s house for the sandwiches that Tom and Gerri brought with them from London, Carl rejoins them and things boil over into a full-scale row. This scene epitomises the strengths and the weakness of Another Year: the bleakness of the occasion is gripping, the euphemising small talk is just right and the actors, Ruth Sheen especially here, are spot on in trying to keep things on an even keel. But the climactic explosion of anger from Carl (Martin Savage) is jarringly overdone.
Leo Robson and Philip Kemp in his S&S review stress the chasm between the happy and the unhappy characters. Robson’s labelling Tom and Gerri ‘hollowly happy’ is a little unfair – it seems to reflect his view that the couple turn out to be not as nice as they first seemed (particularly because the professionally compassionate Gerri becomes less tolerant of Mary). While you’re in doubt of the pleasure they take in their companionship, Tom and Gerri don’t come across as complacently contented: their sensitivity to the misery around them seems to sharpen their awareness of their relative good fortune – in small but telling moments like Gerri’s asking Jack (Phil Davis) – another barbecue guest and the fourth member of the golfing quartet with Tom, Joe and Ken – about his ailing wife and getting a gloomy reply. If this happy couple accentuates the positive it’s because of the proximity of the negative to them. At the same time, people naturally want to increase their happiness and Joe’s failure to find the right girl is a worry to his parents, especially his mother. That’s why the arrival of Katie – and the fact that Gerri and Tom really like her – matters and why Gerri is angry with Mary, when her behaviour threatens to send the girlfriend packing. On her arrival at the house in spring, summer and autumn, Mary immediately launches into torrential, self-centred jabber. In winter, it’s very different; the closed-off Ronnie, who’s come back to spend a few days with Tom and Gerri, isn’t any kind of audience and, when she and Tom come back from the allotment to find their unexpected guest, Gerri doesn’t allow Mary her usual opportunity to sound off. You sense Mary’s dismay at being deprived of this (it carries through to that final shot).
Gerri’s character is sharpened when she becomes less generous: she may earn a living listening but she makes it sharply clear to Mary that her nearest are her dearest, and that there are limits to how much counselling she’s prepared to do outside work. The structure of Another Year, although it’s highly serviceable, does give rise to one significant problem of emphasis: it makes Mary seem a dominant presence in the lives of Tom and Gerri. I assumed we were meant to think that Mary’s four appearances at their house were the sum total of her annual visits but her continuing presence there – in terms of screen time – naturally produces a different emotional effect. It becomes hard to imagine their relationships with other people, except for their son (when Mary’s not there, we see Tom and Gerri mostly in each other’s company). And Mary’s extreme brittleness – her inability to conceal her feelings however disruptively they cause her to behave in company – means that you struggle to believe, unless this year is a great deal worse than any other in her life, that the friendship could have survived this well this long.
In a brief but crucial appearance as Janet, Imelda Staunton is superb: she gives this woman both documentary reality and complete dramatic definition. His much larger role as Tom gives Jim Broadbent the opportunity to develop a more richly detailed character but Broadbent essentially combines the same qualities as Staunton – I think this is his finest performance yet. There are so many highlights in what he does – one that’s stayed in the mind particularly, a month on from seeing the film, is the conversation between Tom and Ken, after the latter’s burst into tears about his wretched life and the two men are left together in the garden (Gerri has gone to bed). Broadbent is wonderfully sensitive here. Peter Wight, as usual in his work with Leigh, is excellent as the ravenous comfort-eater Ken; so is Oliver Maltman as Joe, in whom you see his father’s wit and humour but also a streak of pomposity (which seemed to me a generational trait). Ruth Sheen is often radiant as Gerri: if she seems to be giving Tom the same amusedly loving look repeatedly, you believe it. She is less comfortable when she’s talking: she sometimes sounds to be conscious of speaking lines in a way that robs her voice of the naturalness of her physical movement and expression. David Bradley, who had never worked with Leigh before, is splendid as Ronnie. In London with Tom and Gerri, Ronnie stays nearly silent and remote but Bradley shows the circulation slowly but definitely returning to him in the warmth of the household. The difficult scene between Ronnie and Mary, who arrives on spec when he’s alone in the house, is very well played by Bradley and Manville. There’s an ambiguity in her question ‘Do you want a cuddle?’ Is it she who wants one or is Mary really, clumsily trying to care about someone else? (Or is it both things?) The character of Katie is a breath of fresh air, for the family and for us in the audience: Karina Fernandez plays her with a lovely gauche vivacity. (The character isn’t miles away from Poppy in Happy-Go- Lucky but easier to like because the role is so much smaller.)
In Another Year, people encouraged to talk about their sad circumstances (Janet, Ronnie) clam up while others (Mary, Ken) describe their unhappiness without invitation. The film really is sad and funny at just about the same time. Several times I laughed and found myself trying to pretend I hadn’t because the wretched aftertaste kicked in and it felt wrong to be amused. The credits describe Another Year as a Simon Channing Williams production but the producer is Georgina Lowe. Channing Williams, who produced many of Leigh’s films, died in April 2009. It’s a double sadness that he didn’t live to see such a good one.
9 November 2010
