Film Review: Another Year

4/5

I finally got round to seeing the latest Mike Leigh film – after more than a month of dillying and dallying and people letting me down and the weather being too cold for me to consider leaving the house.

I thought it an unusually gentle film for Leigh – in tone, it falls somewhere between the (almost) light-hearted Happy-Go-Lucky and his other, heavier films. The film centres on a year in the lives of Tom and Gerri, a sixty-something couple who seem vaguely if not ostentatiously, well-off. Something in the mood of the film made me think of Dylan Thomas’s ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’ simply because Tom and Gerri seem to be doing the opposite, advancing gently and happily towards old age. At one point, sitting in bed, Tom observes to Gerri that ‘We’ll be part of History, soon,’ and it is not said sadly or regretfully, but rather contentedly, a statement of something that should be.

All of the cringeworthy observation and tragedy of this film is centres on Mary, Gerri’s colleague and co-worker for twenty years. Mary is divorced, now single, lives in rented accommodation, likes to drink a bit more than she should and wears her emotional need on her sleeve. She is desperate for change, for a man, for love and excitement, but the men she likes never look her way and the changes she makes quickly turn to disasters. Played brilliantly by Lesley Manville, who slurs and jerks and weeps her way through the film rather brilliantly, Mary is not simply grotesque, but makes uncomfortable watching throughout.

David Cox (Guardian, 9 November 2010) seems to think the portrayal of Mary is rather sexist – a ‘witch-hunt’ in fact, for ‘the mature single woman…deviant, desperate and pathetic.’ I disagree because Mary has a male counterpart in the film in the shape of Tom and Gerri’s long-time friend, Ken. Single, overweight, alcoholic, surpassed in his job by younger men, left out of office social events and living far away from his remaining (and partnered) friends, Ken is truly isolated and is portrayed as being as much of a disaster area as Mary.

The key difference between the two lies not in how the other characters react to them but in how they see themselves. Ken, bewildered by the way the world has changed around him, has no illusions about himself and makes advances to Mary because he recognises her as being in a similar situation. Mary, on the other hand, fails to see herself as she is and this leads to many of her problems. Failing to realise her alcohol problem, she buys a car and drives drunk all over London. Failing to realise that his good humour with her is polite friendliness, she tries to get closer to Tom and Gerri’s son, Joe, by suggesting they go for a drink. However, it’s worth pointing out that the ‘crime’ which leads to the damaging of her friendship with Gerri is not, as Cox suggests, her daring to desire a younger man, but her inability to face up to the reality of the situation: that he is not interested.

Cox’s argument unravels further when he refers to ‘leftover women…expected to provide tireless but unrecompensed support for people who matter more than them, as babysitters, carers or shoulders to cry on,’ because Mary, more so than her male counterpart, Ken, receives support from Tom and Gerri on a regular basis. She is invited to their home for meals regularly, sometimes stays over, and meets Gerri for after work drinks. I think it is naïve of Cox to suggest that Mary represents all single mature women – after all she’s someone you can ‘smell the crazy’ on from across the room – but if that were the case I’d say the character demonstrates that lonely women can count on a lot more support and nurturing from their friends than men in a similar situation.

A special mention must also go to the scenes set in Derby, which somehow captured it perfectly – even the oddly-shaped mirror in Ronnie’s house was exactly the kind my dad’s parents had in their house in Ripley and the curtains (probably dating from the 1960s) brought back memories of visiting them in the 1980s and wondering why everything had to be so brown. Superb!