Review of Another Year (2010) by Matt G — 05 Mar 2011

What allows Mike Leigh to create masterpiece after masterpiece is his blatant and conscious apathy toward the imagined idea of "plot" that has poisoned modern film making. When you leave Inception, you remember action set pieces and the vague, rambling ideas that supply the excuse for the visuals.

When you leave Another Year, you remember the people. The two central characters, a married couple named Tom and Gerri, have an unchanging marital bond. Like Poppy in Happy-Go-Lucky, the world tests them and changes around them, but they never succumb.

Leigh has found a structural ideology to accentuate them: the movie is split into four seasonal chapters, all with a specific visual look. Each of the seasons is accompanied by a few new characters who come into Tom and Gerri's lives.

One character who visits time and time again consistently throughout the story is Mary, played by Lesley Manville. Mary is unforgettable. She pangs with loneliness as she grows old, she aches desperately for love and unconsciously becomes a nuisance for her happy friends.

Like all of Leigh's characters, there is a moving familiarity to Mary, Tom, Gerri, Ken (Tom's overweight alcoholic middle aged college buddy), and Ronnie (Tom's emotionally distant older brother).

From the first moments we meet them, we feel we know them, and each scene explores the numerous layers to who they are, how they feel, and how they will react to the passing of time. Leigh suggests that one of the most tragic (and most beautiful) aspect of life is that time never stops, and human beings never stop getting older and never stop changing.