Another Year

 Another Year (2010) is a two-hour film by Mike Leigh, the celebrated British director.  In recent years, Leigh has specialized in comedies of humours, that is, dramas in which the director illustrates with didactic vigor the way in which people afflicted with a temperament governed by anger, or melancholy, or manic joy interact.  Although Leigh's urban Brits don't think in terms of black bile or excess of blood (if you are sanguine), they act under the influence of these humours even in the context of efforts of modern-day counseling and psychoanalysis. In Happy-go-Lucky (2008), Leigh shows a woman in the grip of manic exuberance; everything makes her happy, including events that are disastrous.  Hard Truths (2024) shows us the inverse case -- the heroine in that film is afflicted with anxiety and interprets everything as a personal insult.  Naked (1993) shows us a case of intellectual logorrhea with a co-morbidity of sexual sadism.  Life is Sweet (1990) is about an existence dominated by an eating disorder.  Another Year follows the seasons on their diurnal round:  a couple who are phlegmatic and sanguine (nothing troubles them much) interact with characters who are doomed to desperate, unremitting sadness.  I have called these films "comedies" because the extremity of monomania shown in the pictures is grotesquely comic -- but the pictures are mostly about very unhappy people.

Tom and Gerri are a happily married couple who have been together for 37 years.  They have one son, Joe, who is a lawyer or paralegal with a legal aid society.  Tom is a geologist who assesses the soil conditions for tunneling projects.  We see him inspecting core samples with a jeweler's loupe.  Gerri is a psychologist and counselor.  (In the first scene, we see her meeting with a gloomy insomniac played by Imelda Staunton -- she was the protagonist in Leigh's Vera Drake.  The woman is hostile and sullen and we are given the clear impression that nothing can be done to help her.  She is invested in her misery.)  Gerri's secretary is named Mary.  Mary is an attractive woman in her late forties.  She is desperately needy, searching for a boyfriend.  She drinks too much, becomes morose, and throws herself at men who aren't interested in her.  Tom's friend, Ken, is a fat alcoholic who smokes too much and is also hopelessly miserable -- he seems like a heart attack waiting to happen and he is also desperately searching for companionship.  Although Ken is interested in Mary, she is repulsed by him and, when he tries to embrace her, she beats him off and tells him that they can't even be friends.  The film has little plot.  The picture basically chronicles Tom and Gerri's interactions with their friends, particularly, the morose Mary and poor Ken.  Mary flirts with Joe; he is certainly much too young and cheerful for her.  Midway through the film, Joe turns up with a pretty, vivacious girlfriend.  This torments Mary who is overtly cruel to the young woman.  In the film's last third, Tom's older brother, Ronnie, loses his wife.  We see the funeral service of Ronnie's wife, whom he seems to have mistreated, and, then, a catastrophic encounter with Ronnie's son who is enraged by his father and, in general, mad at everyone.  Ronnie is too grief-stricken to care for himself and, so, the ever- generous Tom and Gerri take him into their comfortable London home.  While Tom and Gerri are cleaning up the tools and harvesting the last vegetables at their allotment, Mary appears at their home.  Mary has previously been neatly dressed and attractively made-up.  Something terrible has happened to her and she wears no make-up, seems pale as a ghost, and, since it is winter-time, is half-frozen, trembling with the cold.  Ronnie is suspicious of Mary, but warms to her slightly when they smoke outside the house.  Tom and Gerri return to find Mary desperately flirting with Ronnie who remains half-comatose with grief.  Tom is outraged at Mary's impudence at showing up at their house uninvited.  Apparently, there has been some sort of falling out with her, although we don't know exactly what has happened.  Nonetheless, Tom and Gerri make food for Ronnie and Mary and, then, Joe and his girlfriend appear as well.  The film ends with happy banter at the dinner table while the camera focuses on Mary who seems miserable to the point of suicide, grimacing in agony as she sits with her glass of wine and her food before her.  In many of Leigh's pictures, the characters are given an enterprise as a subplot that exemplifies their emotional dilemma -- most notably, in Life is Sweet about bulimia, there is a subplot involving a character's attempt to start an upscale restaurant; Timothy Spall plays the grotesque restauranteur whose business fails hopelessly.  In Another Year, Mary scrapes together all her resources to buy a car.  But she has purchased the car from two crooks and the vehicle doesn't work and her efforts at upkeep of the vehicle destroy her.  By the end of the movie, she has sold the car for the cost of towing and twenty quid; thieves have broken into the car and she is emotionally ruined by the experience.

The melancholy events in the story are moderated by the wisdom and nonchalance of Tom and Gerri and the happiness of the couple, Joe and his girlfriend.  Leigh's longtime D.P., Dick Pope shoots the movie unobtrusively.  The film is exceedingly subtle and, I think, would repay several viewings.  One aspect of the film's sadness involves the inevitable round of the seasons and how the passage of time is reflected in the activities of the gardeners at the allotment.  Tom and Gerri, and Ronnie together with Ken are all at the ends of their lives.  Tom, reading in bed with Gerri, says that, when he was younger, he never cared much for history but now history interests him.  Gerri says that this is because they are becoming "historical".  We have the sense that Tom denies his interest in history when he was younger to make a point about time passing -- actually, he probably was always interested in history.  Gerri is attuned to his sadness and makes explicit what he has implied.  I highly recommend this movie but it's not for all tastes -- nothing happens and the film ends without any sort of climax or, even, resolution.  That's the essence of most lives and their tragedy:  nothing much happens.