Another Year

In Another Year, director Mike Leigh takes viewers on a completely unsentimental journey into the lives of Tom and Gerri (Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen) who are that rarest of cinematic coups, a happily married couple. It’s obvious that they love each other, but it’s equally obvious that Tom and Gerri are happy because they’ve been through rough times in the past and came through them only because they had each other. Unfortunately, the life lesson they have learned through experience are lost on their friends, especially the very lonely Mary (Lesley Manville) a woman who so desperately wants to be with someone that she’ll latch on to almost anyone who so much as looks at her. It’s the perfect movie for intelligent film fan looking for a movie that makes them think and feel things that most movies today have forgotten all about as they fill the screen with easy to digest cinematic pabulum and ignore the honest complexity of human emotions and relationships. Leigh doesn’t hand you any simple answers as you watch Another Year, but he gets you to think while he entertains, and that is indeed a rare gift from a director these days.