This weekend I caught Mike Leigh's understated British drama Another Year. After toodling down Solano Avenue, I saw the advertisement for Another Year at the Albany Twin. I had no idea what it was about, but all those icons for its appearance at various film festivals told me that it MUST BE GOOD.
Indeed, it is very good...albeit in a depressing, almost too honest kind of way. The film centers around the lives of Tom and Gerri (seriously), a happily married professional couple who enjoy their life in the London suburbs. Given their genuinely happy lives, their friends' lives appear like a shambles. This is particularly true of Gerri's work friend Mary, who drinks too much and is extremely lonely (and thus, needy).
It's not just friends. Late in the film--which cycles through a year in the life of Tom and Gerri--we learn abut Tom's older brother Ronnie, who lives much more modestly in the working class north. Ronnie's wife has died and the family (Tom, Gerri, and son Joe) head north to pay respects. Very few people make it to the funeral home, where the service is officiated by a pastor who never knew Ronnie or his wife. Ronnie's son Carl makes it to the service after it's already over. He's enraged that people didn't wait, but another service was scheduled and there was no time for waiting. It was the first time he'd seen his father in several years.
My grandfather died in 2007. The service was in a funeral home, officiated by a minister grandpa had never met. Fortunately there were more people at the service than in the movie, and no crazy Carl's. Still it felt bittersweet. My dad had to wrangle with the funeral home over various details (I don't recall the issues now), and all throughout that trip I was aware of the huge gulf between my life (then living in New York City) and that of my family members who had never left central Ohio. In Another Year it's clear that Jim only returns to his hometown when he really has to, which is how I feel these days too. Jim eventually invites Ronnie to return to London with them for a while, and although Ronnie is supposed to head home I hope he stays put.
At the very end lonely Mary invites herself into the house when Tom and Gerri aren't home. By this point Gerri is much less warm to Mary--a delightful person but a sad sack too--than she was earlier in the year. Maybe Gerri's mad about Mary's aggressive pass at her young son Joe earlier that year (although it's unclear if Joe ever told his Mom about it.) Maybe Gerri's simply realized that her life and Mary's have nothing whatsoever in common, and she would rather not have to deal with her except at work.
In any case, the last scene is a dinner party to which Gerri reluctantly invites Mary. Joe has a steady girlfriend now, Katie--a fact that saddens Mary although she never had a chance with Joe. Everyone is enjoying the conversation (even, one hopes, strong and silent Ronnie.) But Mary looks shattered by the happy tales of travel and an all-around good life. Her eyes reveal just how far this is from her reality. The question becomes: should the happy folks tamp down their enthusiasm out of deference to Mary? Or is this not a fair expectation, since Mary wasn't supposed to be there anyway?
I felt bad for Mary, but also believed that everyone else had a right to be happy around her. If a group is mostly functioning well it can be hard to know how to approach the "outlier." Ruthless dismissal is horrible, but then again endless solicitousness is excessive. There are no easy answers to these human dilemmas, in this or any year.
An yes. A reflective piece which reminds me again of why I like your writing. The layers of emotional participation and the social observations and with the shifting between the two give me pause and thoughts of.... yes and so it is.
Aunt Linda
Posted by: Linda Socha | March 04, 2011 at 05:23 AM