This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Feb. 3, 2011 - The thoroughly independent British director Mike Leigh, one of today's most consistently interesting filmmakers, begins with a general idea of what he wants to shoot and works with his cast to improvise a script. The process is so successful that, last year, Leigh was nominated for an Oscar for the screenplay of his marvelous "Happy-Go-Lucky." I have to confess I wanted "Happy-Go-Lucky" to win (it didn't) just to see how many people Leigh would drag up on the stage to share credit with him.
"Happy-Go-Lucky" was graced with a hard-to-resist performance by Sally Hawkins ("Made in Dagenham") in the lead role of Poppy. The comedy was the story of a young woman whose glass was always at least half full, even when she was faced with what the rest of us might consider a severe emotional drought. The overall message of seemed to be, "If someone is happy, even if circumstances may not justify it, what's the problem?"
"Happy-Go-Lucky" had a delightful way of surprising you and of making you like and care about Poppy even when her relentless cheerfulness started to get on your nerves. Leigh's new movie, "Another Year," is not quite as successful in tugging us into the heart of the central characters, but the film is insightful and touching. It is superbly acted and is definitely worth seeing.
"Another Year" opens with the actress Imelda Staunton ("Vera Drake") moaning glum monosyllables in a futile therapy session with a cheerful psychological counselor named Gerri. Staunton's depressed character, who refuses to be cheered up, seems like the anti-Poppy, and we may think for a moment that the movie is going to be about her and present the flip side of "Happy-Go-Lucky." And you can almost hear in your mind's ear the missing but implied word in the title: "Another (Horrible) Year."
But after the movie gets rolling, Imelda Staunton disappears and the focus segues to counselor Gerri (Ruth Sheen); Gerri's retired academic husband, Tom (Jim Broadbent), and their friends and family. Nothing very dramatic happens, but the movie unfolds in a series of episodes that reveal various facets of the main characters. It is funny and sweet, if a bit manipulative.
Tom and Gerri cook and garden together and get along very well. You can tell they have had their problems, but essentially they have a happy marriage. They have a grown son whom they adore, and vice versa.
Their two best friends, or at least the two friends they spend the most time with in the movie, are unmarried and miserable.
Mary (Lesley Manville) and Ken (Peter Wight) are physical opposites -- she is small and fidgety, he is burdened with weight and clumsy. But otherwise they are very much alike: insecure, socially inept, unable to control their intake of alcohol. Aha, you think, they should get together and they would be as happy as Tom and Gerri.
Ken wouldn't mind, but Mary has a fixation on younger, better-looking men -- like, unfortunately, Tom and Gerri's grown son, Joe (Oliver Maltman), a sweet soul. Joe has obviously had a lot of experience in deflecting Mary's flirtatious overtones and treats her like a favorite aunt, which just makes Mary come on stronger. And drink more. And say nasty things to poor Ken.
In short, Mary and Ken are unhappy and lonely. Tom and Gerri are happy, in great part because they have been lucky enough to find one another. And so it goes.
Mike Leigh has a well-deserved reputation for scathing satire and even misanthropy, and some people see this movie and think it is about the unhappy friends and Tom's angry punk of a nephew, who makes a memorably disputatious appearance near the end of the movie. (Leigh is good on memorably disputatious interlopers, as he demonstrated in "Happy-Go-Lucky" with the fairly brief but unforgettable appearance of Eddie Marsan as a volcanically opinionated driving instructor.)
I think "Another Year" is about Tom and Gerri, a happily married couple. I must be one of those people who look at a glass of water and think its half full, not half empty.
Opens Friday, Feb. 4
"Biutiful"
On the other hand, sometimes the glass is clearly and irrevocably empty, dry as the desert. That is the case with "Biutiful," a melodramatic tale of poverty and suffering that revolves around a superb performance by Javier Bardem.
"Biutiful" has received some ecstatic reviews, and Bardem, with reason, has been nominated for a best actor Oscar. Despite Bardem -- or maybe, in a perverse way, in part because of his performance -- I didn't much like the movie. Let me be clearer. Life is too short to spend two and a half hours of it watching a relentless downer like "Biutiful."
Directed by Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu ("Babel"), "Biutiful" is set in the lower depths of Barcelona and is the story of Uxbal (Bardem), a minor crook and hustler who is dying of incurable cancer. When he is not worrying about his two needy children and his mentally unstable ex-wife, he is in the illegal immigrant business, keeping track of Chinese sweatshop workers and Africans who peddle counterfeit handbags.
Bad things happen to him and those around him. He feels guilty. Things do not end well, despite an effort by the filmmaker to let a small ray of sunlight pierce the darkness toward the end.
"Biutiful" has a cinematic rawness that fits the subject well and in general is effective in plunging us into a world of misery. Maybe that's part of the problem -- the movie doesn't transcend the material. In the end, I didn't walk away from it feeling that I had learned anything I didn't know before -- except that Barcelona had lower depths -- or felt anything I hadn't felt before. Or even felt anything I had felt before and wanted to feel again.
Opens Friday, Feb. 4
Harper Barnes, the author of Never Been A Time: The 1917 Race Riot That Sparked The Civil Rights Movement, is a special contributor to the Beacon.