Perhaps the most significant moment of Mike Leigh’s
Another Year comes near the beginning when we see the
great Imelda Staunton (Vera
Drake) in a cameo role as one of the
abandoned souls whom the film’s heroine, Gerri (Ruth Sheen), spends
her work days as a therapist talking to. Miss Staunton’s character,
Janet, has been having trouble sleeping, and Gerri is trying to
probe gently beneath her embittered emotional surface for the
causes. “What’s your happiest memory?” she asks as one of a series
of questions trying to get at the invisible standard of comparison
that is making Janet’s life so miserable. Janet either fails to
understand these questions or refuses to answer them until Gerri
asks, gently, “What is the one thing that would improve your life
— apart from sleep?”
“Different life,” says Janet between clenched teeth, using
as few words as possible.
We see no more of Janet in the film — though another
character later becomes her male counterpart — nor is any further
account offered by Mr. Leigh for her unhappiness. He is unconcerned
with where it comes from or what it leads to, as if he himself
partakes in his character’s fierce determination to keep such
knowledge from the world and instead hoard her grievance, whatever
that might be, all to herself. We soon realize that he is starting
as he means to go on, too, for neither are we allowed any more than
the slightest glimpse of what T.S. Eliot once called (in the
context of explaining what he called the “artistic failure” of
Hamlet) the “objective correlative” for the problems of
the film’s other emotionally crippled or otherwise unhappy
characters — principally Mary (Lesley Manville), Ken (Peter
Wight), Ronnie (David Bradley), Carl (Martin Savage), and Jack
(Phil Davis).
You’ve got to wonder if the unhappiness of all these
people is represented in the film only in order to point a contrast
with the happy marriage of the couple at its center, Gerri and her
husband, Tom (Jim Broadbent), whose easy companionship is
symbolized by their labors on the family’s “allotment,” or
state-allocated garden plot, where we see them performing seasonal
chores in each of the film’s four sections. Like Sally Hawkins’s
Poppy in
Happy-Go-Lucky, (2008), Tom and Gerri are an
island of happiness in a sea of discontent and even misery. Mary
and Ken, for instance, are both family friends who seem to bask in
the happiness of Tom and Gerri as if it might be catching. Both are
both lonely and drink too much and, although on the one occasion
when we see them together Ken seems interested in romantically
pursuing Mary, she runs from him as from an image of her own
unhappiness.
Ronnie, Tom’s recently widowed brother who still lives in
the little family row-house in the industrial North, whence Tom has
migrated to university and then to London to work as a
geologist-engineer, is as taciturn and obscure as Janet. Carl,
Ronnie’s son, apparently hates him — and pretty much everyone
else. We do know that, long ago, during the Clough “glory years”
(see Tom Hooper’s
The Damned
United of 2009),
father and son never missed going to a Derby County football match
together, but now they are estranged, again for no known reason.
Carl is one of those Mike Leigh characters, like Eddie Marsan’s
unforgettable driving-instructor, Scott, in
Happy-Go-Lucky, whose mysterious state of boiling rage is
constant and constantly boiling over. “The question is, will he
turn up?” — that is to his own mother’s funeral. “He’d better,”
replies Ronnie ominously. In the end he does, but only as it is
ending, which gives him yet another grievance against his father,
for not making the crematorium hold the service until he got
there.
Gerri says at one point about Carl: “He was such a lovely
kid, full of fun,” to which his father replies with what appears to
be genuine wonder: “Was he?” Later on, Mary says to Ronnie: “Do you
know Ken?”
“Yeah,” says Ronnie.
“He’s a bit weird,” says Mary.
“Is he?” says Ronnie — perhaps to signify that Ken is no
more weird than he, or anybody else for that matter.
Many, no doubt, will consider Mike Leigh’s own emotional
reticence in denying us further information about these characters
a serious or even fatal flaw in the film, but I think that it is
one of its strengths. He also denies us, in other words, the
illusion of knowledge and therefore control, the easy assurance to
be derived from the sort of explanations in which a therapist like
Gerri might be expected to specialize. And not only are there no
psychological explanations but no political, ideological,
sociological or theological ones either. All the film’s sad
emotional inequalities remain as unaccounted-for as any of the
other sorts of inequalities that continue so to vex us in a world
where so many of us have come to expect the kind of happiness that
Tom and Gerri alone, here, have achieved.
Joe (Oliver Maltman), their lawyer son, is also seen at
first as being emotionally unavailable. His parents have no idea of
whether he has a girlfriend or not until he brings one — in the
person of Katie (Karina Fernandez) home to meet them. But he and
Katie end up appearing to have a chance at the sort of happiness
Tom and Gerri, though no one else in the movie, appears to have.
Like Joe’s parents, both of them are interested in other people and
sympathetic towards their failures and misfortunes while at the
same time maintaining a certain detachment, a cool self-possession
that keeps them from being dragged down by the others. In the
film’s fourth and final segment, some cause of estrangement has
developed between Gerri and Mary. “You let me down,” says Gerry to
her. Typically, we are not told what this is, but the fact that
Gerri follows up by saying, “This is my family,” indicates that she
means to draw a circle inclusive of Tom and Joe and Katie and even
Ronnie, the other people present at the time, but not Mary. Perhaps
Mary’s sexual suggestiveness to Joe is her way of trying to force
her way into that circle, even if it is not what has led to the
estrangement.
And yet Mary is forgiven, again, and in the final scene,
Tom and Gerri and Joe and Katie and Mary and Ronnie are seated
around the table at dinner as we listen to the film’s only serious
excursion outside its own present. Tom is explaining how he and
Mary met — on their first day at the university — and were
separated by his first job in Australia; how she came out to
Australia to meet him there and then how they traveled back to
Britain together overland through Asia. Their sense of being
plugged into the world outside their own is contrasted with the
self-absorption of the others. Mary, for instance, talks of having
worked as a barmaid in Corfu for a while, but this has produced no
lingering result, no shared memory that she cares to contribute to
the discussion. Even Katie, who once spent time in Sydney, is not
shown as having brought anything back with her, though she claims
to have enjoyed it.
Just before this dinner, and before we hear of her having
alienated Tom and Gerri to some extent, Mary appears to have
designs on the recently widowed Ronnie almost as soon as she meets
him, unpromising material though he would seem to be for
any relationship, and tries to make conversation. “It’s
really lovely to have someone to talk to,” she says to the
virtually catatonic Ronnie, echoing her own words to Gerri in the
opening segment. Hearing a song playing on the radio, she asks him,
“Did you like the Beatles?”
Ronnie answers with a typically laconic: “They were all
right” — but then he adds, unexpectedly: “I was more Elvis. Jerry
Lee Lewis.”
“‘All shook up,’” says Mary — which, in the context, is a
great joke.
Mike Leigh used to be all shook up too but, perhaps
because he has grown older, he is now less inclined to anatomize
people’s griefs and grievances, instead focusing on that much rarer
quality of contentment that we see in Tom and Gerri, whose names
are an ironic allusion to the battling cat and mouse of cartoondom.
This Tom and Gerri enjoy a kind of peaceful acceptance of the world
as they find it, which is at the opposite extreme to the
revolutionary sentiments that have at times in the past bubbled to
the surface in Mike Leigh’s movies. To my eye, Mr. Leigh in his
maturity (he turned 68 last Sunday) has finally managed to see past
the class antagonisms with which he has at times in the past been
almost obsessed, at times to the detriment of his movies, and
instead trained his sharp eye on a human problem that transcends
the vicarious resentments so beloved of those critics who prefer
politics to humanity.
At one point, as Tom and Gerri are reading in bed
together, he says to her: “I never liked history at school, but it
seems more relevant as you get older.”
“We’ll be part of history soon,” says Gerri without
emotion.
“Exactly,” says Tom.
Could happiness in the end be something as simple as
remaining open and sympathetic to the emotional losses of others
while declining to complain about one’s own? It may be
so.
