Trying to catch up with the Oscar nominees has been a disappointment. I can't see anything substantial about the 'great movies' of 2010. So a little movie like Another Year is a rare blessing.
British filmmaker Mike Leigh and his ensemble of veteran actors – Jim Broadbent, Ruth Sheen, Lesley Manville, Peter Wight, David Bradley, Imelda Staunton, Philip Davis – get together for one of Leigh's improvised screenplays, full of naturalistic dialogue, and the result is a powerful drama, sprinkled with a healthy dose of humour, about loneliness, alienation, sadness, the emptiness of modern life and that hard to explain feeling of being trapped in a room without doors every day of your life.
Another Year is a triumph of acting and writing. All the actors, perfect in their roles, deliver mesmerising performances. This is the ensemble movie of the year – forget The Social Network or The King's Speech. Whether it be Martin Savage, who bursts into the movie with the power of a tsunami and electrifies the screen with a performance burning with anger and aggression for a handful of minutes, or Lesley Manville, who's the centre of the movie, draining herself out of energy like a power battery little by little as her character's life becomes progressively worse and she gets more desperate, the movie never fails to personify the excellence of acting.
The story, divided by the seasons, takes place over the course of a whole year, and concerns the middle class couple of Tom and Gerri and the dysfunctional, depressed people who orbit around them – co-workers, old friends, relatives. Well-adjusted, well-off, happy, they're like a rock of stability and counsellors to others. They organise barbecues in the garden, cook for friends, listen to their problems. Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen slip effortlessly into their roles, radiating joy, serenity and patience.
The movie, however, would be dull if it were just about happy people. The underside of all this happiness is that it attracts the misery of others. Many people, always in trouble, slip in and out of their lives: the old friend Ken (Peter Wight) who can't accept aging and the new generation supplanting his; their distant son, Jerry (Oliver Maltman); Tom's brother Ronnie (David Bradley), whose loss of his wife has left him sort of numbed. And then there's Mary (Lesley Manville), the emotionally-draining friend whose craving for attention and nurture leads to some of the tensest and most embarrassing moments in the history of recent dramas.
At the start of the movie Imelda Staunton, in a short but amazing performance, plays an unhappy woman talking to a counsellor; on a happiness scale of one to ten she doesn't hesitate to give it one; she can't explain why, she only knows that nothing changes and she can't remember any happy memory in her life. Without stating it, this is the direction Mary is heading for.
I think cinema in 2010 has created few characters as fascinating and complex as Mary. When she first enters the screen she looks like she's plugged to a nuclear power station – she just goes on and on and on and on, without running out of energy, a chatterbox to end them all. But this is all illusion. She talks because she fears silence, the emptiness. She doesn't have much of a life: she only knows Tom and Gerri, she prowls bars looking for men, she drinks a lot and she's decided to buy a car (possibly because, like drinking, it fills her life with a semblance of substance). Her wearied face, with its sunken eyes, has sadness and fear carved deep to the bones. I've never seen Lesley Manville in a movie before, I just know that for two hours I believed there was a miserable woman called Mary in London probably contemplating suicide. This is the beauty of the movie: it makes the viewer imagine things that aren't there. Manville impersonates her character so well, she gives it so many ticks and mannerisms, the life of her character extends outside the screen; I can still imagine her living now that the movie is over. The character is fascinating but Leigh also made an excellent decision to give it to Manville.
The dialogue also serves this movie very well. Possibly the best scene in the movie is the awkward scene when Mary meets Joe's new girlfriend. In a previous scene Mary had made very obvious advances to him. When she meets Katie (Karina Fernandez), all her resentment spills out in the form of double entendres incomprehensible to Katie but obvious to Joe and his family. The tension just keeps rising and rising, becoming unbearable, but there's no respite for the viewer, it keeps going, and it's funny and brutally sad at the same time.
Mike Leigh received a well-deserved Oscar nomination for the screenplay. He won't win, of course, but his loss won't feel as unfair as the snub Lesley Manville got. In a year when an overrated Natalie Portman is set out to win an Oscar for a mediocre performance that ticks off all the boxes on a long list of clichés about tormented geniuses coping with madness, it's a delight to watch Manville truly embodying loneliness and unsurpassable despair. Perhaps it was too raw, too realistic, for audiences to digest. The caricatural Nina of Black Swan is definitely easier to cope with (and we can even get aroused by her). Movies like Another Year easily get lost in the confusion of vapid press releases, viral marketing and controversy. I'm not so deluded to think that time will restore it to its proper place in film history. I just hope that, amidst all the noise generated by hype, the people who can enjoy a movie like this discover it.
British filmmaker Mike Leigh and his ensemble of veteran actors – Jim Broadbent, Ruth Sheen, Lesley Manville, Peter Wight, David Bradley, Imelda Staunton, Philip Davis – get together for one of Leigh's improvised screenplays, full of naturalistic dialogue, and the result is a powerful drama, sprinkled with a healthy dose of humour, about loneliness, alienation, sadness, the emptiness of modern life and that hard to explain feeling of being trapped in a room without doors every day of your life.
Another Year is a triumph of acting and writing. All the actors, perfect in their roles, deliver mesmerising performances. This is the ensemble movie of the year – forget The Social Network or The King's Speech. Whether it be Martin Savage, who bursts into the movie with the power of a tsunami and electrifies the screen with a performance burning with anger and aggression for a handful of minutes, or Lesley Manville, who's the centre of the movie, draining herself out of energy like a power battery little by little as her character's life becomes progressively worse and she gets more desperate, the movie never fails to personify the excellence of acting.
The story, divided by the seasons, takes place over the course of a whole year, and concerns the middle class couple of Tom and Gerri and the dysfunctional, depressed people who orbit around them – co-workers, old friends, relatives. Well-adjusted, well-off, happy, they're like a rock of stability and counsellors to others. They organise barbecues in the garden, cook for friends, listen to their problems. Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen slip effortlessly into their roles, radiating joy, serenity and patience.
The movie, however, would be dull if it were just about happy people. The underside of all this happiness is that it attracts the misery of others. Many people, always in trouble, slip in and out of their lives: the old friend Ken (Peter Wight) who can't accept aging and the new generation supplanting his; their distant son, Jerry (Oliver Maltman); Tom's brother Ronnie (David Bradley), whose loss of his wife has left him sort of numbed. And then there's Mary (Lesley Manville), the emotionally-draining friend whose craving for attention and nurture leads to some of the tensest and most embarrassing moments in the history of recent dramas.
At the start of the movie Imelda Staunton, in a short but amazing performance, plays an unhappy woman talking to a counsellor; on a happiness scale of one to ten she doesn't hesitate to give it one; she can't explain why, she only knows that nothing changes and she can't remember any happy memory in her life. Without stating it, this is the direction Mary is heading for.
I think cinema in 2010 has created few characters as fascinating and complex as Mary. When she first enters the screen she looks like she's plugged to a nuclear power station – she just goes on and on and on and on, without running out of energy, a chatterbox to end them all. But this is all illusion. She talks because she fears silence, the emptiness. She doesn't have much of a life: she only knows Tom and Gerri, she prowls bars looking for men, she drinks a lot and she's decided to buy a car (possibly because, like drinking, it fills her life with a semblance of substance). Her wearied face, with its sunken eyes, has sadness and fear carved deep to the bones. I've never seen Lesley Manville in a movie before, I just know that for two hours I believed there was a miserable woman called Mary in London probably contemplating suicide. This is the beauty of the movie: it makes the viewer imagine things that aren't there. Manville impersonates her character so well, she gives it so many ticks and mannerisms, the life of her character extends outside the screen; I can still imagine her living now that the movie is over. The character is fascinating but Leigh also made an excellent decision to give it to Manville.
The dialogue also serves this movie very well. Possibly the best scene in the movie is the awkward scene when Mary meets Joe's new girlfriend. In a previous scene Mary had made very obvious advances to him. When she meets Katie (Karina Fernandez), all her resentment spills out in the form of double entendres incomprehensible to Katie but obvious to Joe and his family. The tension just keeps rising and rising, becoming unbearable, but there's no respite for the viewer, it keeps going, and it's funny and brutally sad at the same time.
Mike Leigh received a well-deserved Oscar nomination for the screenplay. He won't win, of course, but his loss won't feel as unfair as the snub Lesley Manville got. In a year when an overrated Natalie Portman is set out to win an Oscar for a mediocre performance that ticks off all the boxes on a long list of clichés about tormented geniuses coping with madness, it's a delight to watch Manville truly embodying loneliness and unsurpassable despair. Perhaps it was too raw, too realistic, for audiences to digest. The caricatural Nina of Black Swan is definitely easier to cope with (and we can even get aroused by her). Movies like Another Year easily get lost in the confusion of vapid press releases, viral marketing and controversy. I'm not so deluded to think that time will restore it to its proper place in film history. I just hope that, amidst all the noise generated by hype, the people who can enjoy a movie like this discover it.