Another Year

Not the recipe for an extraordinary, adventurous life, possibly. Definitely not rules that movers and shakers adhere to. After all, nobody would ever make a movie about well-balanced, courteous people.

Except that Mike Leigh has.

And the moral of his story? Sometimes circumstances are sad, but if you are a truly depressed person, it’s probably your own fault.

This may sound like an unsympathetic portrayal of human nature. After all, bad things happen to good people, blah blah blah. But have you ever noticed it’s kind of true? There are those people who seem to be disaster/drama magnets by their own design. And maybe sometimes they can justify this to themselves by saying they are "having fun" or "therapy's not for me," but the only people they are convincing are themselves.

Chances are you know people like this, unless you are one, in which case I would not recommend seeing Another Year unless you want to finally understand how annoying you are.

At the heart of the story are Tom and Gerri (haha), a middle-aged, middle-class, frumpy English couple. He’s a geologist, she’s a counselor, their son is nice and also a lawyer, somehow. They treat each other with respect; they enjoy gardening, cooking and drinking wine. You know, yuppy things.

And like most mentally healthy people, they are preyed upon by emotional leaches. Namely, Gerri’s old friend and co-worker Mary and Tom’s childhood buddy Ken. Both are depressive alcoholics in their mid-to-late 50s who seem oblivious to the fact that they are no longer 22. They are both desperately lonely and deluded, but their attempts to find companionship are by turns bumbling, embarrassing and alienating.

Which, of course, is where the comedy comes in. That is, if your idea of comedy is toe-curling, forehead-slapping scenes of awkwardness. It all seems so real.

All of the characters are so realistic, so relateable, that halfway through you start thinking one of two things: “Ugh! She’s exactly like so-and-so”; or, more depressingly, “Am I that obese, middle-aged moron?” Right before you pop 'round to your local liquor store.

This is probably why everyone (literally) who has the great fortune to review movies loves this one so much. Mike Leigh has held a mirror up, not just to well-educated British boomers, but to everyone  who is either an adult or who exists in a perennial state of tedious adolescence--which pretty much includes everybody over the age of 23.

By the end of the movie, Tom and Gerri, with their courteousness, garden-fresh tomatoes and cozy bookshelves, seem like the revolutionaries, the glue holding the fabric of society together.

It turns out that people who treat each other well really are the happiest. And the rarest.