Another Year

In most years Mike Leigh is in the running for best director, but this is just Another Year, well-done and extremely watchable, though at times excruciatingly so.  Lesley Manville has been widely celebrated for her portrayal of a desperate lush, trying to fend off the sexual and existential panic of middle-age, but she is just one of the characters that circle around the cozy central couple played by Ruth Sheen and Jim Broadbent – she a counselor, he a geological engineer, both products of the Sixties -- who seem to maintain an open house for family and friends, while extending an open-hearted acceptance, even acquiescence, to the quirks of others -- until one of them does the unacceptable.   Leigh always creates characters who are real and rounded and whole, but your heart does not go out to any of this bunch, as it did to Vera Drake or Poppy in Happy-Go-Lucky, so you are left with their foibles, be they smugly happy or desperately unhappy.   They are analyzed as specimens, all too human specimens, but the film, while even-handed, remains stubbornly unsympathetic on several levels.  Not as unsympathetic as Naked, but not among the director’s most approachable, such as Topsy-Turvy.  Nonetheless, Mike Leigh remains a must-see.  (2010, MC-80)