Another Year

Every now and then, in conversations with fellow movie-lovers who aren't paid to review films, I hear the complaint that "they," whoever they may be, don't make "adult" movies anymore. Or rather, since in some circles the term "adult" is a euphemism for porn -- which, last I looked, "they" still do make, and plenty of it! -- "movies for grown-ups" is what the missing kind of film is called. A short answer is that a lot of "them" still make movies for grown-ups, but many of those movies are in a foreign language. One director with a very proven track record in this respect makes them in English, and he's been making them in English for the better part of four decades, and his name is Mike Leigh.

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His latest picture, "Another Year," seems to some to be, well, just another Leigh. But for this relative grown-up, the movie had a direct emotional impact, and that impact took root and has been resonating with me since I saw the film for the first time in the fall, at the New York Film Festival. At that time, I observed that a number of my film-reviewing colleagues tended to take Leigh and his work for granted. I think that's ill-advised, because, as I noted then, nobody makes films that feel and play the way his do, for better or for worse, and after he's gone, it's doubtful that anybody else is going to. His deep-dish method of creation -- involving intensive preparation with his actors and a huge amount of controlled and oft turned-over improvisation -- yields results that have the depth of meaning you get from exceptionally-written drama, but also a variety of seeming spontaneity and urgency that stage work can usually only achieves with a sacrifice of coherence.

The structure of the story is announced by the title. Starting in the spring, it chronicles a year in the lives of thoroughly civilized old London couple Tom and Jerri (Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen) and their circle. Most prominent therein is Jerri's troubled, over-drinking 50-something work colleague Mary (Lesley Manville). She's got, among a number of other tics, an inappropriate crush on Tom and Jerri's single, solid, slightly dull son Joe (Oliver Maltman). The others into whose painful lives we get privileged glimpses include Tom's Hull-based pal Ken (Peter Wight), who drinks as hard as Mary, only his tipple is lager and spirits rather than Mary's ostensibly innocuous white wine. Also making a big impression is Tom's very quiet older brother Ronnie (David Bradley).

Tom and Jerri are cheery, comfortable old lefties who've understood that they're not in a position to change the world anymore, and have gotten to be fine with that -- there's a correlation between this picture and Leigh's 1988 "High Hopes," in which a younger (obviously), punkier, leather-jacketed Sheen played one half of far a more agitated couple in Thatcherite Britain. As for Mary, her life is one (largely invented) turmoil after another, and the couple's dealings with her frantic plaints eventually get the viewer to wondering whether these nice, settled folks are really all that nice. Mary is very clearly an alcoholic. But the A-word is never once dropped in the film. And Jerri, who's a therapist herself, never even suggests counseling, or a support group, to Mary until an almost cruel hammer-dropping scene near the film's end. Tom and Jerri are so very polite, so very indulgent, so very correct in all their dealings, all the while dispensing conventional left-liberal wisdom spiked with conventional complacent cynicism whenever contemplating a crisis, be it global or local. But it's clear that all the while, they're stifling their own strong feelings of put-upon-ness and resentment. As much as you like them -- and maybe you won't like them, (that's one of the things about Leigh's films and their characters, they're so unusually and thoroughly textured that they never seem designed to elicit a simple response) -- you have to wonder if they're so besotted by their own comfort and contentment that they can't help but act as passive-aggressive near-monsters to the people they're supposedly close to.

As Tom and Jerri are laid bare (or are they? That's another thing about Leigh, that he never appears himself to be making any kind of overt judgments on his characters, or even preparing any kind of melodramatic reveal of their hidden natures) the film brims with uncomfortable little touches. A more conventional, or maybe I should say less intelligent, filmmaker would have brought the two drunks Mary and Tom together for a romantic folly maybe. Instead, Mary is vividly repelled by Ken. His mess is more visible in its manifestations than hers, and it gives her the opportunity to lord it over him in a sense; which opportunity she takes willing advantage of. Her high-hatting contrasts in a rather sickly way with her fake little-girlishness in the presence of Joe. It is all rather terribly sad. But strangely enough, hardly un-entertaining.

Bleak as some of the content is, the storytelling is fleet, witty, and the cinematic settings quite companionable. The acting is, as is not unusual in a Leigh film, uniformly terrific, and Manville as Mary is particularly outstanding. It's virtuoso work in every sense. When Mary ineptly flirts with Joe, she looks almost as coquettish as she imagines herself. And when disappointment or rage hits Mary, as it inevitably does, Manville's face deflates, the lines on it seem to increase, and she looks practically corpse-like. If they still give awards to grown-up movies (Leigh himself has never won an Oscar; he has been nominated on several occasions, much to the bemusement of seasoned awards handicappers, it seems) Manville should be up for something in the coming month or two.

Glenn Kenny is chief film critic for MSN Movies. He was the chief film critic for Premiere magazine from 1998 to 2007. He contributes to various publications and websites and blogs at http://somecamerunning.typepad.com. He lives in Brooklyn.