Another Year

Plot synopsis:
Tom Hepple, a geologist, and Gerri Hepple, a counsellor, are an older married couple who have a comfortable, loving relationship. The film observes them over the course of the four seasons of a year, surrounded by family and friends who mostly suffer some degree of unhappiness. Gerri's friend and colleague, Mary, works as a receptionist at the health centre. She is a middle-aged divorcee seeking a new relationship, and despite telling everyone she is happy, appears desperate and depressed. She often seems to drink too much. The Hepples' only child, Joe, is 30 and unmarried and works as a solicitor giving advice on housing.
In the summer, the Hepples are visited by Ken, Tom's old friend from his student days. Ken is overweight, eats, smokes and drinks compulsively and seems very unhappy. Tom and Gerri host a barbecue in Ken's honour. Mary drives her newly bought car to the party, but gets lost and arrives late. Having had some wine, she flirts with Joe, whom she has known since he was a child. He remains friendly but does not reciprocate the flirtation. After the party, Mary reluctantly gives Ken a lift to the train station. He makes a clumsy romantic advance and Mary irritably rejects him.
Months later, in the autumn, Mary is once again at Tom and Gerri's home. Joe arrives with a new girlfriend, Katie. Mary appears rude and hostile towards Katie, which is not appreciated by Tom and Gerri. This creates a rift between Gerri and Mary.
In the winter, Tom, Gerri, and Joe attend the funeral for the wife of Tom's brother, Ronnie. Towards the end of the service, Ronnie's estranged son, Carl, arrives, and angrily asks why the ceremony was not delayed for him. At the reception at Ronnie's house, Carl becomes aggressive and walks out. Tom and Gerri invite Ronnie back to London to stay with them for a while and Ronnie agrees.
While Tom and Gerri are at their garden allotment Mary arrives unannounced at their home and persuades Ronnie to let her in. Her car has just been written off and she is upset. The two have a cup of tea and a desultory chat before Mary takes a nap on the settee. When Tom and Gerri return they are unhappy to find Mary at their house. Gerri explains to Mary that she feels let down by her earlier behaviour towards Katie. Mary apologises and weeps. Gerri gradually extends a degree of warmth to Mary, suggesting that she should seek professional help and inviting her to stay for dinner, and the two women set the table. Joe and Katie arrive, their relationship still appearing strong and happy. The Hepples enjoy dinner together. Mary eats with them but appears lost and uncertain.

Tags: romantic, boring, depressing

Review:
Their friends and family, by contrast, all struggle to some extent with unhappiness, and a sense that their best years may be behind them.The film is a story of ageing; the small events that can make life either comforting or unbearable; and the refuge that companionship can offer.Rut Sheen's role as Gerri is superb.
Jim Broadbent's Tom is charming and self-effacing, confident in his own happiness yet nonplussed at the failure of his friend Ken – Peter Wight – to come to terms with growing old.The film dwells on the small, predominantly non-verbal signals that reveal emotional and social insecurity.
The cyclical nature of the structure suggests that there is no real remedy for those left unloved and lonely at the film's conclusion.From the opening scene, where a woman silently struggles to recollect the happiest moment in her life, to the point when the dialogue slowly fades away to leave Mary isolated and forlorn, we cannot help but be both enchanted and dismayed by the emotional honesty of Mike Leigh's characters.
Tom and Gerri (Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen), the couple at the centre of Mike Leigh's latest existential piece, couldn't be more unlike the cartoon characters who share their names.
I wouldn't complain if my marriage looked like theirs when I'm in my 50s.When he isn't working as a geologist and she isn't counselling people, they spend their time providing solace to those who need it – Ken (Peter Wight), a straight-talking, John Smiths-drinking Yorkshireman; Ronnie (David Bradley), Tom's laconic brother whose wife has just died; and most of all Mary (Lesley Manville), a jittery colleague of Gerri's in the middle of a mid-life crisis.
With the UK attempting to educate 50% of the secondary school student population to university level, a socially engineered bifurcation to haves and have-nots is being created once again.All of the characters in the film are from working class backgrounds and yet the fortunes that life has graced them with are distinctly uneven, they have gone in different directions, absent any idea of a shared experience that may have been the rock of previous generations of Britons.
Mary for example was never allowed to help with anything, though this does not excuse her, at times, appalling behaviour (depression makes people selfish, however I feel it necessary to point out as well that someone who is drowning in a river and calling for a life ring, is also being "selfish" in the same way, and I think metaphorically the position is very similar).Dour joyless watching, maybe one for the Cabinet to watch, after the example of the film La Haine, which concentrated on French malaise and was screened in front of the French cabinet at the instigation of Prime Minister Alain Juppé..
Lesley Manville's agonised performance as Mary, aching with envy at the solidity and comfort of her best friend's solid marriage, must be a shoo-in for awards next year, but Ruth Sheen is also 100% believable as the endlessly patient, almost 'saintly' Gerri.
Lesley Manville as Mary truly deserves the Best Actor Oscar for her perfectly nuanced, scary and convincing portrayal of a woman on the brink of personal desperation due to her many life mistakes and to her extremely fragile emotional nature that served to spiral her further and further down toward mental illness with every romantic disappointment and life mistake she made.
An astounding performance, and so touching, as you felt every pain Mary felt due to Lesley's spot-on interpretation of her character's neediness and weaknesses and what they cost her.This film tells a story(by the 4 seasons)of a year in the lives of a UK couple and their friends.
a woman too attractive to always be alone but always is alone after every failed attempt at a relationship, always suffering badly from each failure to find what she wants so badly.Not much of an intricate plot here, as in all Mike Leigh films, but the story was such an absorbing and typical Mike Leigh take on the day-to-day happenings in the ordinary and everyday lives of a normal UK couple and some at-risk friends.
Wonderful portrayals, both.See this film for engaging personal interaction and for the best acting performance of 2010, but be prepared for your own uncomfortable and awkward feelings throughout due to Mary's many sufferings and how her endless tales of them affected her(long-suffering)friends.
The foundation of the film, as well as the foundation for most of the other characters in the film, is the happily married couple of Tom and Gerri, played by the terrific Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen.
She is single, not getting any younger, desperately trying to avoid loneliness (too often with a bottle), masking her fear through fake excitement, and latched onto the security blanket offered by Tom and Gerri's friendship.When family friend Ken (Peter Wight) makes a move on Mary, she shuns him because of his lack of perfection.
In Mike Leigh's new slice of life, Another Year, a married couple who have managed to remain blissfully happy into their crumbling autumn days are surrounded over the course of the four seasons of one seemingly average year by friends, colleagues, and family, many of whom appear to suffer some degree of unhappiness or at least confusion.
As it's a Mike Leigh film, all the actors will all have been living "in character" for maybe six months before breezing through, stirring up the plot with their back story and emotional infrastructure.Lesley Manville, as Mary, the lonely and unstable girl of a certain age - 40, going on 17, really steals this in the final part, which gets even more intense than the rest of it.
Mike Leighs wonderfully ironic yet sweet look at life takes a little twist in this super ensemble movie which centers around Tom and Gerri and shows us these characters mainly as reflected by their friends and kin.
Since we learn almost nothing about these people (and they certainly seem to learn nothing about themselves), it is, worst sin of all, boring.The emotional center/hole of this film is Gerri, the counselor, whose inadequacy/ ineffectiveness is highlighted by an early scene with a potential patient, the actress Emelda Staunton, a working class person who presents with depression.
It becomes apparent that Mary has had a series of spectacularly inappropriate failed romantic relationships (including one with a married man) and during the movie, an attempt at relationships with Gerri's son, 20 or so years her junior, and Tom's brother whose wife has just died.
This serves to emphasize the distance the film has from the actual characters.Over and over again, Tom or Gerri ask "how are you" when it is completely obvious that the person to whom this is addressed is collapsing.All in all, a series of poorly connected people with no insights or resolution.
So when, at the end of this movie, the therapist Gerri tells the disturbed Mary, who thought she was a friend of 20 years duration, to see a therapist, I had a different reaction to this movie than many others.This movie, about the happy middle-class couple Tom and Gerri, is more a cautionary tale that "friends" are not the same as family, and that therapy and friendship evidently cannot mix.
Gerri, who is supposed to be warm and nurturing, is cold to Mary, as cold as she was in her counseling session with Imelda Staunton which starts the movie.At the same time, Tom's brother, Ronnie, who has been widowed, has not been seen at all during the prior year and has not even been mentioned.
Since it's one of the absolute best movies of 2010, the answer is a sweet and swift "YES!" The film spans over the course of one year in the life of a happy, and healthy elderly couple, Tom and Gerri.
The two of them have a son named Joe, and over the time frame of the film, try to spread their own cheer to their less than cheery friends, such as the distraught Ken, Tom's under spoken and passive brother Ronnie, and their alcoholic, and also quite conflicted friend Mary.First praise goes to the cast, featuring a huge group of characters, and none of them feel wasted.
Other cast members who do a convincing job include David Bradley, Peter Wight, and the miracle that is Lesley Manville, who steals every scene she's in, gripping us with her enigmatic exterior, until delivering a punch to the gut in the film's final 20 minutes that broke yours truly down to a teary mess.But the real star of Another Year is Mike Leigh.
Mike Leigh's 'Another Year' at first feels like a very smug movie: a likable, affluent couple pass their time together over the course of a year, often in the company of variously inadequate friends who alternately entertain them and require their support.
What makes the film a success is the sheer skill with which director and cast pull off the individual encounters: Leigh famously prepares for writing the final drafts of his scripts through improvisation, and this film in particular feels like an assembly of scenes emerging from a workshop, but there's no denying they're beautifully done, drawing you into the misery of the characters even where you knew exactly what was coming.
Isolation and loneliness have often hit people late in life, but Leigh is showing how the collapse of any public life in the provinces is making this unfortunate situation more likely for more people.It would be easy, and wrong, to see Tom and Gerri – yes, this awful gag is deliberately played upon from time to time – as a smug couple lording it over their unfortunate friends.
A seemingly simple tale of a year in a number of people's lives, the film plumbs the inner soul of all the characters, especially that of Mary played by the astonishing Leslie Manville.
Her performance as the tragically depressed Mary will stay with you for days and will easily erase the memory of the over the top dying swan of this years Best Actress winner.) As with all Mike Leigh films, Another year is not for everyone, but if you are a serious lover of film you must not miss this wonderful production.
The film is focused around the happily married couple Tom and Gerri played by Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen.
It stars Lesley Manville as Mary and Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen as Tom and Gerri, a relatively old married couple.To be honest, I didn't find any theme in this movie, and it lacked a plot.
It follows Tom and Gerri's family and friends' lives throughout a year, without being even remotely interesting.To like this movie, you have to be into long and slow movies without much action, and it appeals more to old people than teenagers.This movie wasn't my cup of tea at all.
Tom and Geri are completely unable to deal with her and end up just shutting her out of their lives.I don't know if it's intentional or not but this film depicts all the horror of middle- class English life: cold and uncommunicative people who only seem nice but are really nasty to one another underneath, horrified at the slightest manifestation of emotion (be it love or anger), always wanting to dilute every experience and take the sting out of every situation.The idea of the "year" is supposed to be conveyed by the four seasons, depicted as the four seasons in the allottment tended by Tom and Geri.
It's clear that Mike Leigh had something interesting he wanted to say with the film - something critical about English society- but he slips into making it a soft-focus poem about the happy, basically stupid life of Tom and Geri with their allottment and their cups of tea.
I loved this film -- another excellent character study from Mike Leigh and a solid, "quiet" standout film that should have been nominated for the Best Picture Oscar instead of 99% of the ones that are on this year's ballot (exception granted to The King's Speech).If you like noisy, action-packed films, then don't go, and please don't post a one-star review of how "boring" this film is.
Unlike most Hollywood films that mainly depict the lives of quirky young, well-to-do suburbanites, Mike Leigh's Another Year, shows a mature, apparently well-matched, and devoted couple that has been together for 35 years and their efforts to offer solace to their not so fortunate friends.
Leigh's Tom (Jim Broadbent) and Gerri (Ruth Sheen) show begins when Gerri, a medical counselor, attempts to minister to Janet, a sleep-deprived, depressed older woman (Imelda Staunton) without any emotional response."On a scale of 1 to 10", she asks the patient, "How would you rate your happiness?" The answer not surprisingly is a "One", but Janet refuses to discuss her personal life any further and Gerri is left in a state of frustration.
Like many people who believe that happiness lies in accumulating things, Mary buys a used car and this makes her happy, at least for a few days, until the car acts up, she gets lost a few times, and collects parking tickets.Things go downhill from there when the wife of Tom's uncommunicative brother Ronnie (David Bradley) dies suddenly.
We follow four seasons in the lives of the middle-aged married couple Tom and Gerri (Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen), their 30-year-old bachelor son Joe and Gerri single colleague Mary (Lesley Manville).
Another Year is among his most tranquil films, a reflection of life passing, and Tom and Gerri are among his most understanding, quiet characters - they listen, understand, and make peace when things are turbulent.
The story of a year in the life of the two main protagonists isn't especially interesting but then again other Leigh films like High Hopes and Naked have very little happening in the way of actual plot.
My favourite Leigh work is Career Girls, Meantime, High Hopes, Life is Sweet and the TV movie Nuts in May, however Another Year lacks the black humour of those films hence why i only gave it 7/10.
First one is Mary (Leslie Manville) is a middle-aged divorcée receptionist, heavy alcoholic desperate seeking a new relationship – and eye Tom and Gerri's son Joe (Oliver Maltman) who is much younger - around 30 years old.
Tom and Gerri have a simple happy life but people around them seem to have problems.Mike Leigh produces a not-very-dramatic relationship at the center of this movie.
In his most recent work, he brings together practically all of his directing powers, culminating in a very serious, and sometimes charming, story focusing on a loving couple and the various sorts they have remained friends with over the years.Like so many of the greatest directors, Leigh has established a strong rapport with a small collection of actors, resulting in very strong performances every time out.
The characterization of especially the married couple Tom, Gerri and Gerri's friend Mary is so powerful that in few seconds you forget that it's a movie as it seems like a camera on someone life.
Mike Leigh's films have been constantly sterling all these years, I have only watched three so far NAKED (1993, a 6/10), VERA DRAKE (2004, a 9/10) and SECRETS & LIES (1996, a 8/10), in ANOTHER YEAR, Leigh conspires a more conventional route rotates around a cozily married old couple, Tom & Gerri, and their 4-seasoned episodes with the closest people to their life.
Tom and Gerri has a good life and are often visited by their successful thirty-year-old son Joe, but they also have a close friend named Mary who is not at all content with her single life.Acutely and precisely directed by English filmmaker Mike Leigh, this finely paced and dialog-driven character piece portrays an involving and intimate story about interpersonal relations, family relations, coming-of-age, loneliness, friendship, marriage and love during four seasons in London, England.
While notable for it's naturalistic urban milieu depictions, ardent production design by Simon Beresford, cinematography by British cinematographer Dick Pope, his seventh collaboration with Mike Leigh, and a subtle score by English composer Gary Yershon, this existentialistic, humane and poignantly atmospheric slice of life conveys a charmingly humorous and unsentimental tale.This incisively written independent film which depicts several studies of character, is impelled and reinforced by it's stringent narrative structure, the heartfelt, understated and remarkable acting performances by English actor Jim Broadbent, English actress Ruth Sheen, English actress Lesley Manville and some fine acting performances from a great supporting cast.
Director: Mike LeighStarring: Jim Broadbent, Ruth Sheen, Lesley Manville, Peter Wight, Oliver Maltman, Karina FernandezWe are following the happily married couple Tom and Gerri through a whole year.
The film is a British comedy / drama that revolves around a happily married couple who are visited throughout the year by their family and friends who are not so happy, for the most part.
Although Leigh did receive an Oscar nomination for original screenplay he's admitted (as with all his movies) the actors improvised for sometime (getting into character with each other) prior to filming which grew into the final script.Broadbent plays Tom and Sheen plays Gerri, a married couple who's been together for quite some time.
Watching a Mike Leigh movie is a bit like eavesdropping on the lives and conversations of people we may not know personally but whom we sure do recognize, since we see so much of ourselves reflected in them.
At the core of the film, however, lie Gerri (Ruth Sheen) and Tom (Jim Broadbent), a happily married couple who somehow seem to have come to terms with the realities of life and aging and, thus, serve as pillars of moral strength and emotional stability that others can lean on in times of stress.
The movie another year is directed by Mike Leigh is a typical brutish film.
It's a film about a cinematic rarity--a happily married couple.Tom (Jim Broadbent) and Mary (Lesley Manville) are a happy and contented couple who are comfortable in their life and their marriage.