Writer-director Mike Leigh proves that there is no such thing as an ‘ordinary’ person
By Elise Nakhnikian
AT the Q&A after a press screening of Another Year at last year’s New York Film Festival, writer-director Mike Leigh bristled at a question about how he created his final script in rehearsals with his actors. Why this obsession with how I come up with my scripts?, Leigh said. Everyone goes through some process of revision before they’re ready to shoot a movie.
Annoying as those questions might be after all these years (Leigh’s been making movies for 30 years), I can see why he’s still getting them. Leigh’s finely detailed character studies have a lived-in, emotionally authentic feel that few other filmmakers can achieve, and those who do, including Rahmin Bahrani, Laurent Cantet and Jia Zhangke, often employ much the same method as he does. First they create the broad outline of a story, then they gather their cast and rehearse for months. In collaboration with the actors, they work out the details of the story and flesh out the characters, who are often based in large part on the actors who play them.
The resulting films are neorealist, almost documentary-style fictions about a particular place, time and set of people. Their plots rarely follow a neat dramatic arc, but the insights and interactions they capture make them moving and thought-provoking. In movies like his latest and 2008’s Happy-Go-Lucky, Leigh distills the drama in everyday life, proving the point that there is no such thing as an “ordinary” person.
Another Year, as its title indicates, is the story of a typical year in the lives of its main characters. That’s Tom (Jim Broadbent) and Gerri (Ruth Sheen), a very happily married couple, and their friend Mary (Lesley Manville). As usual, Leigh roots his story in the heart of England’s working and middle classes, emphasizing the connection between who people are and what they do for a living. A social worker who deals with her friends’ neuroses and depression as empathetically as she does with her clients’, Gerri is nurturing and unflappable. Tom is a soil engineer whose cooler, more analytical intelligence provides some insulation from the psychological pyrotechnics that often go off around this calm couple, whose cozy home provides shelter to Mary and a succession of other more or less wounded souls.
A secretary at the agency where Gerri works, Mary is a painfully lonely and insecure woman who labors to cover her cringing desperation with a running line of chat and a wardrobe that leans a little too hard on her fading good looks. Her decades-long friendship with Tom and Gerri is the closest thing Mary has to a family, but it’s not close enough, as becomes clear when her neediness seems to threaten their son’s new relationship with a young woman Tom and Gerri like very much.
Unsettling music, sparingly used, and lingering close-ups of the increasingly abject and twitchy Mary make the agony of her alienation painfully palpable, and watching her deteriorate under Gerri’s loving gaze raises some uncomfortable questions. Does Gerri and Tom’s friendship keep Mary emotionally afloat, or does it just torment her with a constant reminder of the intimacy she longs for but can’t quite share? How much of the couple’s feelings for their friend are based on love and mutual interests and how much on a perhaps unthinking, and perhaps somewhat paternalistic, impulse to be kind to the needy? Can kindness be a form of cruelty, if it leads to a severely lopsided relationship?
The staunch realism of the film’s look, the universally excellent acting, especially by longtime Leigh collaborators Broadbent, Sheen and Manville, and the actors’ resolutely unglamorous faces (“Obviously, Ruth and I don’t do anything peculiar with our faces off screen,” said Manville at the NYFF Q&A) help create the illusion of watching real lives unfold over time. As in life, tempers can explode suddenly and scarily in Another Year, but the film’s main drama derives from its searching exploration of the gap between a particular subset of haves and have-nots: life’s haunted loners and those lucky enough to form deep and long-lasting relationships.
Rated PG13 for some language. 129 minutes.

