Mike Leigh’s latest offers director’s trademark nuanced techniques
Mike Leigh’s films are quite unlike anything else in the contemporary film landscape. More than just “slice of life” films, they often bury the drama so deep inside the nuances of the characters’ semi-improvised interactions that it takes an astute eye and heavy levels of investment to draw out meaning.
“Another Year,” an Oscar nominee for Best Original Screenplay, exhibits all of Leigh’s best qualities without pushing his own envelope.
It doesn’t quite latch as gracefully onto its gently devastating crescendos like Leigh’s arguably best work, “Secrets and Lies” (1996), and it doesn’t accumulate the kind of pure spirit his last film, “Happy-Go-Lucky” (2008), managed to miraculously pull off.
The film follows a year in the life of late-middle age couple Tom (Jim Broadbent) and Gerri (Ruth Sheen), whose stable and pleasant existence is in marked contrast to their friends’, whose lives all seem on the brink of despair. Through a series of conversations, parties and revelations, “Another Year” gleans deep insight into each of its characters without having to apologize or grandstand for them.
Broadbent and Sheen do tremendous, if quiet, work, their solidity acting as both the film’s constant and its emotional marker — all the characters relate back to them and their existence serves as the prism through which to think about how the other characters operate.
While all the acting has the kind of soothing naturalism a Mike Leigh film always comes fully loaded with, the film’s secret weapon is Lesley Manville. As Mary, a lonely and unhappy middle-aged woman desperately trying to make herself appear successful to her friends, Manville knocks the whole film out of the park.
When the camera hovers on Manville’s face, watching her navigate degrees of externalizing and internalizing her character’s disbelief with herself, “Another Year” seems elevated into a whole new stratosphere.
Its two-hour runtime is carefully protracted, the narrative (what narrative there is) almost completely subservient to the interactions of the characters and the gradual revealing of their inner troubles. Leigh’s camera, which prefers extended shots from a distance, observing how couples and groups relate to each other as opposed to sectioning them off into a series of close-ups, feels like it’s floating throughout the film.
The real miracle of his aesthetic is that it feels so effortless. If “Another Year” feels slow, or even boring, it’s because the director’s gift comes from giving small moments a gargantuan meaning, creating substance out of flitters of the eye, cracks in the smile or tilts in body posture.
While it’s primarily an acting showcase, a gift to those who like their performances culled from the well of reality, its cinematic quality is perhaps equitable to taking a warm bath, allowing oneself to feel absorbed in the totality of the experience.
Leigh’s challenge to his audience is to find empathy in the characters, to understand them such that we might be able to better understand ourselves. “Another Year’s” effect is perhaps quiet and small, and its resonance is gradual rather than immediate, but it is still far deeper than the average character piece.