The nod to structure in Another Year, Mike Leigh's latest rumpled, rambling character study, frames it with a gentle irony. A social portraitist known for his regional specialties and organic development process -- his scripts are gleaned from improvisational sessions with actors, in this case a central trio comprising a long-married couple and their wobbly third wheel -- narrative organization is notoriously low on Leigh's list of priorities. And so while the film is divided into the four seasons of another passing -- wonderful, wasted -- year, the time-keeping device serves mainly to highlight how nature shames those of us who remain little changed with its constant, show-offy segues.
Is it possible to be both dark and chattery? Naked, the double-fisted breakthrough that brought the British director and his star, David Thewlis, to prominence on this side of the pond in 1993, offered both the definitive answer to that question and an extreme of the tone that would become Leigh's signature. Where Woody Allen's motor-mouthed New Yorkers speak more or less constantly in therapeutic terms of need and self-improvement -- as if, as Joan Didion pointed out in her potent critique of Manhattan, human happiness were not an abstraction but an estimable, achievable goal requiring dedicated "work" -- the more wretched of Leigh's characters will talk around their obvious issues with such stamina and determination that a simple conversation suggests agonies of denial and self-delusion. It's as subversive and penetrating a treatment of the British character as we get on the big screen, and it's why I don't mind that Leigh keeps them coming 'round with the reliability of the cocktail hour.
In Another Year, the main perpetrator is a tragic lush named Mary (Lesley Manville), a woman of a certain age and wildly uncertain stability. Mary fancies herself a lot of things -- vivacious, appealing, suited to Top Shop camisoles -- but a large part of her is defined against the marriage of her co-worker at a mental health clinic, Gerri (Ruth Sheen), who is married to the equally congenial Tom (Jim Broadbent). For many years, one assumes, it might have worked out well: Married briefly in her 20s, Mary played the vital ingénue to Tom and Gerri's -- yes -- almost comically well-matched, fuddy-duddy duo. But life can be cruel, as Ruth points out, and when enough seasons pass, what was charming and iconoclastic starts looking a little grim. Was Mary betrayed by time -- by life -- or by her own nature and her own decisions? Did loneliness make her a nattering, terror-fueled bore, or is she alone because she's impossible to stomach?
Leigh engages with those questions, and even bigger bogglers -- What is love? What is happiness? When did they both escape me? -- by arranging long, lingering scenes of closely observed behavior of the most ordinary sort. Though he comes dangerously close to making Mary (and then Tom's old friend Ken, a sodden bachelor played by Peter Wight) a grotesque, seizing on Manville's face at its most vacant and pathetic during her drunken, after-dinner devolutions, it is this close scrutiny that allows Mary, eventually, to earn her share of sympathy. Tough going with saints like Tom and Gerri -- at-home organic gardeners so comfortable with each other and their lives that they're almost comatose -- as one's main competition. They make themselves martyrs to the cause of keeping Mary in cups and company, and yet Leigh does suggest the extent to which they need her to help orient themselves and their own satisfactions.
"Love is nothing, nothing, nothing like they say," Liz Phair sang. "You've gotta get up and work the people every day." Did Tom and Gerri just strike it lucky? Or did they choose wisely and invest consciously, foreseeing this moment from decades away? If anything, their bond -- which includes a cozy relationship with their grown son Joe (Oliver Maltman), at whom Mary tilts her wine glass to disastrous effect -- is revealed to be a choice that is renewed constantly, some days with more effort than others. Mary and Ken may make more noise (and their scenes together are almost unwatchably cruel) in their efforts to get by, but the more efficient engine that powers Tom and Gerri is working just as hard. In the wake of his wife's death, Tom's brother Ronnie (David Bradley) is almost catatonic with grief; even the best-laid plans for fulfillment and companionship are foiled every day. As the long, devastating sequence featuring Ronnie and Mary alone in Tom and Gerri's happy home suggests, all we really have is the moment, and the choices at hand.