Mike Leigh’s “Another Year,” nominated this week for the best original screenplay Oscar, begins with a close-up of the face of unhappiness: a bitter woman (“Vera Drake” star Imelda Staunton) convinced that nothing ever changes.
This woman, it turns out, is peripheral to the story — we only s
ee her a couple of times before she disappears from the film — but she stands as a measure of how sour life might become for the film’s other characters.
The film is arranged around a day from each of the four seasons. A sense of the seasons, as it pertains to their active gardening, is one of the grounding elements for geologist Tom (Jim Broadbent) and counselor Gerri (Ruth Sheen), who’ve been married for decades and give off a mellow glow of contentment about their life.
This contrasts with Gerri’s workmate Mary (Lesley Manville), a dithery, hard-drinking creature who can’t figure out why she’s alone and dissatisfied. Mary is the most prominent of the characters who swarm through Gerri and Tom’s world as the seasons go on.
They also have a 30-year-old son (Oliver Maltman), a bloke who keeps his own counsel but who, it turns out, was doing the right thing all along.
Ken (Peter Wight), an old friend of Tom’s, comes for a visit and drinks and eats as though trying to gorge his way into the grave.
Eventually we’ll also meet Tom’s near-catatonic brother (David Bradley) and his furious son (Martin Savage), who provide more reflections of discontent.
Leigh doesn’t go about giving explanations for these expressions of unhappiness. It almost seems a too-obvious point that he has Tom and Gerri as gardeners, working in the earth and pulling out vegetables, as though they are closer to something essential than the others.
By not supplying answers, Leigh forces you to ponder the perplexing question of why some people are reasonably happy and others are unreasonably unhappy. In Leigh’s design, the boozing of two key characters isn’t the cause of their problems, but a symptom.
Leigh’s cinematic investigation, from 1988’s “High Hopes” to 2008’s “Happy-Go-Lucky,” involves his actors in developing the story and characters with him. This invariably results in a searching cruise through various forms of human behavior, but it also gives birth to an unpredictable collection of acting styles, which range from complete naturalism to caricature.
Sheen and Oscar-winner Broadbent are studies in subtlety, while Lesley Manville is very “on” in a busy, complicated turn. A peculiar energy emerges from those different styles, but it works, and anyway, people have different modes of being in real life as well as in the movies, so why shouldn’t their styles differ?
“Another Year” brings you into its world so completely that you begin to notice that Tom and Gerri aren’t without flaws, either. There may be something just a tad habitual about their routines, perhaps something unexamined about their happy marriage.
Or possibly not: But the haunting thing about this movie is, it encourages you to examine the little details that make up this life or that life. Don’t be surprised if that carries over into the real world, too.
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