Mike Leigh’s Another Year, which arrived on DVD in 2010, gets pretty depressing at times, but its sadness fails to induce any real moistening of the eyes. The biggest reason for this is that too many of the characters are too annoying to get close to. While this doesn’t necessarily mean that you feel no empathy for the central tragedy, it’s just that throughout it all you’re just too distracted by how insanely irritating the other characters are to really get into the plot development.
The story centres around long-time, infuriatingly harmonious married couple Tom and Gerri Hepple (played by Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen). It tracks along with them as they welcome their fractured singleton friends and family into their perfect little hum-drum, allotment-tending, po-faced, better than effing everybody else life while cycling through the four seasons of a year.
While the tragic, single lives of jilted Mary, played very well by Lesley Manville (Mum Series 3), widower Ken and Tom’s big brother Ronnie are engaging and interesting, it’s a struggle to feel truly sorry for them. Given a choice between being depressed and broken in middle age like Mary or happily married, but infuriatingly meh like Tom, Mary gets the vote every time. At least she can find someone nice. Tom’s stuck with his holier-than-thou wife forever and they can giddily dish out harshness and compassion as they see fit from their seats of married superiority. It’s in this aspect that the film fell down, robbing the viewer of the empathy that they should truly be feeling for the misfits.
While Another Year is an interesting and engaging film, it is ultimately unsuccessful at its central theme of finding happiness with another and the loneliness of those that fail to achieve it. The acting is excellent for the most part, especially Lesley Manville as Mary, who steals the show as much as possible in the drear delights of the film. It’s good to see that she’s gone on to bigger and better things with the BBC 2 comedy Mum, but here she doesn’t really have the supporting cast and characters to shine.
There are a few cracks in some of the delivery from the likes of Ruth Sheen, who just comes across as ultimately unlikable, and Martin Savage, who was more convincing as the über-camp editor on Extras than he is here as the leather clad angry biker nephew Carl.
Overall, the film is let down by frustrating characterisation, which is a shame because it looked like it was going to be a lot more engaging. Another Year is just about worth a watch to see Lesley Manville’s performance and to rail against happy meh, but it’s far from a must-buy DVD. It pains a little to give a low review score to a Mike Leigh or Thin Man Films film, but Tom and Gerri are just too frustrating to want to see more than once.
Another Year DVD review – 2.5/5
Another Year DVD Special features:
The DVD has limited special features. In addition to the trailer, there are also interviews with Mike Leigh, Ruth Sheen, Jim Broadbent and Lesley Manville about the film.
Age rating
Another Year has been given an age rating of 12 by the British Board of Film Classification with infrequent strong language being the main cautionary reference.
