User Reviews

Many comments in this forum gave a me a wry smile, none more so than the disappointed Portuguese couple who'd obviously wanted a feelgood movie to sweeten their jolly to London, and the 'Vampires Suck' lady who believes that a film must have a definable plot and ending. Thank God for films which refuse to pander to us while we munch expectantly on our popcorn.

This film does NOT offer an uplifting story (or even a plot), or special effects, or a happy ending. Follow the signs to Men In Black instead. Another Year is slow, it's sad (even depressing), and it reeks of personal desperation. But I think it is a hugely underrated gem of a film... if you're prepared to put in the work. It is simultaneously a celebration of fine acting craft and a test of the audience's interpretative skill.

It's difficult to think of a more astonishing performance than Lesley Manville as Mary: hers is a slow & excruciating descent from naïveté & painful insecurity to abject, exhausted desolation, from which we don't expect her to return, no matter how much we hope that she will. Her final scene is as haunting and heartbreaking as any which you're likely to see. We know that her hell is probably of her own doing, but it doesn't prevent our pity of her.

The central characters Tom & Gerri are generally considered happy, and towards whom unfulfilled family and friends gravitate as if Tom & Gerri's union was life's ideal for happiness. However, this 'ideal' is shown up by the absence of any obvious elation, joy or excitement in Tom & Gerri 's lives, and we are similarly responsive to their characters: we neither like nor dislike them, because their happiness seems attractive to others only as a foil to risky failure, not as something to genuinely aspire to. I think Mike Leigh presents us with several questions and human hypocrisies: Mary's disgust at fellow lost soul Ken is surely a subconscious terror of her own similar failures, and Gerri's general benevolence towards longtime friend Mary is exposed as mockery and patronisation when she's in private. Had Mary's & Ken's situations been rescued by the arrival of their respective loves on white horses we may well have been celebrating the exhilaration of love discovered after life's tumultuous roller-coaster. Then the colourless contentment & smugness which Tom & Gerri offer up as life's nirvana would've been relegated to last-resort mediocrity.

Please just strangle that smug couple before I throw something at the screen .. is this the reaction you hoped to evoke Mike Leigh? Or are Tom and Gerri your idea of a "healthy" couple? Are you likewise vapid and sanctimonious? Of course your nebulous framework leaves us only to wonder ...what WAS the message here? yes it made me think, forced me to draw my own conclusions and for that you have again triumphed. These characters stirred up lots of emotion in me. I felt disdain for the heroes (note son's cajoling girlfriend) and genuine empathy/fondness for the tragic ones (all of them).. but then again which were the real tragedies ? Geri and her like are the reason I avoid therapy. Having never struggled herself she is hardly sympathetic. The sanctity of her boring life shelters her from developing real relationships with the fascinating people surrounding her. Ditto Tom. Their shared comfort is wrought with complacency and co-dependence. Neither feels a need to truly relate with other people as they consistently crawl back into each others arms for a nightly sh*t talk about their less fortunate friends. There is nothing wrong with a symbiotic relationship but this one is so lofty and banal I'd rather be single and have a ..well.. personality. that leads us to Mary. poor desperate Mary. She took chances in life that earned her a colorful personality, but scarcely more. She did not settle into monotony yet she found only heartache. She is horribly lonely. Mary's emptiness leads her to vices like alcohol, little red cars and fake friends. Still she is more genuine than the other star players here as she is honest with her misery.

On the surface this is a movie about the day to day life of an elderly, happily married couple (Tom and Gerri), their son and friends, among them Mary and Ken. All seems well in suburban London until that very last shot of the film, a most disturbing scene, the climax of the movie.

We see Mary at the kitchen table of her friends and as the conversation passes her by she realizes she doesn't matter to them any more. Worse, we see it dawning on her that she may never have mattered to them at all in their relationship of 20 years. The comparison with her car is inevitable, a vehicle that should have brought her a sense of freedom, but turned out to be a lemon if ever there was one. As another commenter wrote, it is a scene of exceptional cruelty. (Can I nominate Ms Manville for an Oscar, please ?)

How could this insincerity, this not-so-mild form of wickedness persist over such a long time ? Perhaps it has something to do with the British fondness of manners, but I think it has to do with work, more specifically in Tom and Gerri's case with having a profession, being a professional.

A professional is someone who is applying a set of rules, an algorithm to a standard input to produce a standard output. (What distinguishes a professional from a craftsman is that the input, rules and output are so complex that they defy supervision.) Tom and Gerri are professionals and what they are doing is extending their professional attitude to their personal lives. Their relationship with Mary is professional. Their marriage is dealt with professionally. Their marital bliss is ultimately based on their contentment with the standardized output it produces. Tomatoes anyone ?

Contrast this with Ken and Mary. Ken is an alcoholic in bad physical shape. He was once handsome however and has a good heart. His problem is that he questions the meaning of his job, which in his case seems to amount to questioning the meaning of his life. And then there is Mary. Her goal in life is Love, not work, thereby committing the ultimate sin (not making work your life goal that is).

Two scenes illustrate the stranglehold work has on our lives (and the importance of it for the movie's theme, I think). In the first an Asian couple is visiting Joe, an old man threatened with eviction and a young woman acting as his interpreter, her ability to help the old man, however, limited to the duration of her lunch break. In the second Carl arrives too late for his mother's funeral, having been stuck in a traffic jam. The funeral couldn't be postponed however, another one was already waiting.

So are Tom and Gerri right ? At the dinner table Tom is telling of how he and Gerri met, by chance on their first day in university. This detail hints at the internal inconsistency of their way of life. And of course right at the beginning of the movie there is this session of Gerri with the sleepless patient, an Everywoman. It shows her utterly failing in her role of counselor, her very profession.

Mary is indeed looking for love in all the wrong places. At the end of the film you realize that, despite all appearances Tom & Gerri's was such a place.

This movie touches upon current sociological and psychological conditions that result to alienation and loneliness. The theme repeats itself on the problematic characters of a group of friends in their 50s, namely Ken and Mary as well as Tom's brother. They all resort to alcohol but that is the side effect of their problem, not the root cause. There is an unfortunate equation between single people and despair. This bias is expressed also in the story of the couple's son, who seems to worry during the time he is single and who 'has it made' once he finds a girl who assumes his parents' acceptance and friendship, admits she is starving to people she just met (no manners) and licks her fingers (no manners). Meanwhile Tom and Gerry are the voice of reason and somehow, I felt they were also Mike Leigh's voice. Of course, as others here have mentioned, their portrayal may not be seen as virtuous as I have perceived it. There is a certain coldness within their kindness about them just as cold as the way the priest received the late-coming son of the deceased woman at the funeral.

Mary who is at the centre of the film, is a pile of trouble. She is turned down by Tom and Gerry's ugly son and Tom's socially handicapped brother, only to get attention from fat and alcoholic Ken. In a desperate move to celebrate her independent life rather than mourn for her loneliness, she buys a car but that only becomes a source of more trouble. As if Leigh wants to tell us that no car can give her the happy life of a married couple who live in harmony cultivating their veggies. The question that floats in the air can be whether her unbalanced character has caused her loneliness or vice versa. What keeps this film together are the masterful indoor scenes, the convincing dialogues and the top notch acting. Careful considerations have been made in how people act in their everyday lives and that has been extraordinarily engaging.

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.

Another Year - As the title suggestions four seasons pass and nothing has really changed. Seeing this movie reminds us why we are always looking for an interesting story line or some character development where something has changed which in our opinion this film really doesn't have. For example, Mary (played by Lelsley Manville ) is a reasonably attractive middle aged single secretary working in a counseling center in London and she periodically visits the home of one of her co-workers who happens to be counselor. She is clearly an alcoholic, hasn't been able to establish a good relationship with a man and is barely being politely tolerated during these visits by her friend and her husband. Mary flirts with the couple's son, is disappointed when she ultimately meets his future wife and even unsuccessfully tries to develop a relationship with the tacit brother of her friend's husband while he is grieving for his recently deceased wife. Mary is basically a pathetic person who hasn't changed at all in the year that we observe her. That's it! Now, the acting in this movie is fantastic. All the characters seem quite real. The married couple is warm and friendly and Manville very realistically portrays Mary the alcoholic friend, as did the other actors in their roles. In fact, Manville might even earn an Oscar nomination for her acting However, what we found interesting about this film was not what was on the screen, but rather the unique manner in which director writer Mike Leigh uses to put together this film as well as others which he has done. Lesley Manville was the guest at our preview screening of this movie and she explained how Leigh prepares the barest outline of each character. He then meets separately with each actor for a series of meetings over 2-3 months. During this time the actors invents or develops in detail the background and the history or their character. They construct their family background, likes and dislikes, nature of relationships etc. So then when the characters meet for the scenarios, which Leigh has designed, each actor acts as if they are the character, which they have invented. Various dialogue emerge and Leigh encourages the ones, which he likes. The actors never have a script but ultimately they have agreed upon the words, which they will use when they get around to shooting the film. Seeing the results of this process may be a worthwhile experience for students and aficionados of cinema. It appears to bring out a sense of realism that comes from deep in the soul. However, we get bored and turned off by real people from time to time and we didn't think the experience of watching these people was worth two hours of our time.

This movie was one of the most depressing films I've ever seen and I can relate to it after living 2 years in sad England. Contrary to what many people around the world think - British society is highly dysfunctional, depressed, lonely, lacking in emotions, cold, insensitive and angry. This film depicts all of that. There is an old English couple who are together after years of being Married but they are awfully Boring people.... they have a son who looks like a "potato" and has no personality... and all the other characters in the movie are faaaar toooo depressing to even mention. Sadly - this is very true about modern British society - and I really feel that Britain is the most depressed ugly nation in the world. Compared to France - Britain is socially backward, inept and full of loneliness and this movie successfully shows all that on the Big screen. Moreover Britain is UGLY - and the people are ugly - their ugliness stems not from their race but rather from their diet and depression caused by loneliness.

It's funny but I compare this film to another recently released french movie - My afternoons with Margueritte - which was full of emotions, warmth, drama and beauty... and that is France for you. Even the poor in France are more human than any British - who have all become very cold insensitive people with no connections with their families, society or friends (if they even have any). There is no sense of "community" left in Britain - and it's become like this greedy money obsessed nation where people don't care for each other or for normal human relations. Another Year also shows the reality of family relations in the UK - a son is late for his mother's funeral and doesn't really give a damn anyway - his father lost his wife but seems lost himself...the day she dies he wants to drink beer instead of tea....these are all real situations in everyday life within British society. The little bit of multi-cultural-ism in UK has made it somewhat colourful and interesting - and if it hadn't been for that I would have killed myself in this depressing country after a month of living here. The movie should have been named - "Another Sad Year in Britain".