The Middle-Aged Network

[Another Year]

Directed by Mike Leigh

Runtime: 129 min.

Mike Leigh’s [Another Year] looks at social networking from a mature point of view. Its middle-aged characters, a small group of longtime family, friends and co-workers in London, have a familiarity with each other that turns everyday relations—whether on the job, when traveling or at meals—into startling, vivid and intimate exchanges. This partly has to do with the closeness and understanding that comes with friendship, even kinship, but it’s also the pure pleasure of Another Year’s immediate and constant sympathy.

Leigh’s filmmaking has reached a level of expressiveness where observation becomes revelation and revelation—in the sense of clarifying spiritual and political connections—becomes storytelling. Another Year’s plot does not build to the hoary theatrical contrivance of a calamitous situation where lies and resentments are exposed. (Although that’s obviously in the background of the director of 1996’s Secrets & Lies.) By now, Leigh has also transcended those Humphrey Jennings, Ken Loach roots that linked him to docudrama, kitchen sink convention. He honors their verities, yet his landscape is not so much authentic English environs (as suggested by his “Shooting London” lecture commissioned at last fall’s New York Film Festival); Leigh’s mode is social interaction. The basic British Socialist ideal is transcended into a literal correction of Facebook’s remote dynamics—and this is certainly the year to do it: Leigh focuses on the human face, the territory that features the spectacle of the soul.

Lesley Manville (Mary), Jim Broadbent (Tom), Ruth Sheen (Gerri) and Imelda Staunton (Janet)—all Mike Leigh regulars—live into their roles. They hardly seem to be doing anything except representing recognizable behavior—the rare sight of middle-aged folk involved in daily perseverance (what the girl in Neil Jordan’s Ondine called “the mundane”). They cope in the midst of labor, busyness, respite, communion, obligation or surprise. No self-conscious deliberation seems required for these actors to reveal humanity. Leigh orchestrates their eye contact, flush complexions, even their very breathing, like notes and rhythm in a symphony (as in a remarkable moment when Sheen hugs-it-out with Manville; her exasperation is purged in the very sound of Sheen’s sigh).

Watch the early scenes of Staunton’s unhappy housewife for the depths of withdrawal, her rebellious, self-gnawing anger. A soliloquy of extreme temperament, it’s arranged by Leigh for difficult counterpoint with Sheen’s extraordinary, empathetic patience. It becomes a duet that defines compassion; its subtle dynamics establishing Another Year’s theme and Leigh’s artful humanism.

It’s almost anathema in today’s cultural climate to make a film about non-youth experiences after youth. (“It’s a young person’s prerogative to be noisy,” Tom says.) No doubt part of the reason critics—but not the public—flipped over [The Social Network] has to do with its indulgence of college-years folly and betrayal. It celebrates the media class’s disingenuous nostalgia for their own frat days and post-adolescence; offering the excitement of bad behavior and distrust yet avoiding moral reflection, it settles for self-pitying patronization of the rich and powerful. In Another Year, Leigh demands that viewers look past superficiality and guile that, in youth, is not fully answered for. Doing so permits Leigh to make a landmark cinematic discovery: Middle Age as the moment of self-consciousness.

Chagrin, obligation, judgment, desperation, the hard facts of middle age, make the movie fascinating even as it defies thrill-hungry, narcissistic film culture. (That’s why this amazing movie has come up short during awards season.) Conceiving his story in terms of a movement through the seasons, Leigh captures the weight of swiftly passing years. Not a trite gimmick, the atmospheric changes are visually compelling, although the funereal winter is almost aesthetically trite; yet Leigh and cinematographer Dick Pope justify the conceit—possibly nodding to Ozu. Mortality shadows these characters even in the midst of life.

“We all get older,” says Gerri, a female counselor who's seen it all. Leigh depicts self-pity as spiritual self-abuse. It takes various neurotic forms such as Mary’s compulsive flirting or Ken’s (Peter Wight) gluttony; like Mary, Ken drinks and smokes beyond adult license. It’s how he wards off desperation. Leigh pinpoints this in the casual way Ken is introduced: he seems an anonymous bloke carrying two cans of beer on a train but mere observation turns into moving perception with our awareness of Ken’s abiding panic and then his personal history. Mary similarly drinks and smokes; she’s always anxious but she’s also always desirous which enlarges the character past her peers free-floating panic. Mary’s hopeless sense of being ridiculous puts her in the class of Blanche DuBois and Manville’s grasp of such fragile strength (“My looks work against me”) is equally memorable.

Instead of going for big pathos, Leigh takes common tragedy and willfully contrasts it with the stability of Tom and Gerri’s marriage—a coy cartoon poke at the unfairness of life and the mystery of human symbiosis. Their happy marriage may not be explainable, but it’s implicitly understood. This surpasses romanticism, it is the insight of maturity. Leigh graduates from [Happy-Go-Lucky]’s benevolence to a profound sense of understanding that one’s humanity and vulnerability are always exposed—not as a matter of drama but of sensitivity. It’s a vision that equates to such senior stories as Make Way for Tomorrow, End of the Day and a magnificent time-obsessed classic that advised “42 cannot tell 21 about this; 21 can only know by getting to be 42.” Another Year recognizes the richness (not always happiness) of age.