Another Year - Mike Leigh (2010)

 

To Have and Have not

Mike Leigh’s ‘atypical’ characters often feel like illustrations of clinical categories. Another Year is no exception. His interest seems to lie as much in making us squirm as inducing catharsis. A sense of discomfort not discernibly distinct from annoyance or mild disgust. He achieves this substitution by stuffing his frame with buzzing, twitching, lived-in personifications of socially maladjusted types typically presenting some combination of hysterical conversion, neurasthenia, and plain old grumpy slovenliness. All this should be well-familiar to anyone who's watched previous efforts. What's unexpected is the amount of self-examination the carefully calibrated squirming induces. 

The moral core of the film is a comfortably situated couple near retirement. Smugly content with their lot, Tom Hepple (Jim Broadbent) and wife Gerri (the elfin Ruth Sheen) tend their patch in a local community garden and drink a lot of wine when not professionally engaged. 

The voice of civility and reason, Gerri is a social worker; husband Tom, grounded and affable, a geologist. Paradigms of mental health (progressiveness and prosperity), they represent the pole of sanity anchoring our normative identification. A tale of two gracious hosts put upon by uncouth manipulators and emerging with their dignity in tact may not sound like the stuff of compelling drama, but Leigh and his cast devise to pull us irresistibly into the gently churning vortex of breached social mores and almost predictably missed queues.  

       Moral incommensurability is the focus of Leigh's cinema of domestic ill-manners.
 

The power of the good to diminish us, ubiquitous in life, is rarely explored cinematically. Leigh's emplotment of it comes with the territory of domestic drama. The felicity of the fortune-favored and the unequal distribution of the capacity for contentment is more corrosive of the soul than any economic disparity. In Another Year Mary (Lesley Manville), embodies the self-frustrating vacuum invidious comparison never fails to engender. 

Gerri periodically invites her unattached co-worker Mary to dinner, less out of genuine interest for her professional inferior than a sense of obligation. It's never in doubt that the privilege is Mary's. As her increasingly disordering neuroticism—self-absorption, neediness and general over-acting—become too much to handle, the Hepples must confront the film's pivotal dilemma. 

Thrusting herself into the center of conversation, drinking to inebriation, and over-staying her welcome, Mary avails herself of the Hepple's hospitality to turn them into parent-surrogates. Though they partly bring it on themselves with their ‘motivational’ solicitude. In her regressed states they become unwitting auditors of her interminable grievances. Our sympathy is with the Hepples, yet their neighborliness appears to know no boundaries. They wise-up in due course, but in the meantime we don't know whether to applaud or descry their long-suffering accommodation. 

The discrepancy of provision gives the Hepples a power that must offend egalitarian sensibilities. We feel sorry that they are put-upon by Mary's self-involved desperation, yet the very fact that they are forced to forbear gives them a superiority that belies that friendship is the motive of their hospitality. Not the friendship of equals, in any case, but of dependents seeking charity. 

Their influence is burdensome rather than empowering, investing them with a sense of real responsibility towards Mary. It's painful to watch their bond of friendship erode beyond the point of no-return under the corrosive action of the supplicant's unconstrained need and the host's growing resentment. 

Mary becomes convinced the Hepple's son Joe (Oliver Maltman) would make a promising prospect, a notion she is quickly disabused of when his preternaturally chipper new girl-friend Katie (Karina Fernandez) turns up, becoming the constant trigger of Mary’s 'sorrow' and our annoyance. 

Enthusing with the same manic ebullience of Poppy in Happy-Go-Lucky, Katie's good cheer gratifies the Hepples but repels Mary. What makes Katie and Poppy so irritating is the irrepressibility of their lightheartedness, which deflects all contrary affective modality like a shield. If sympathy is the social grace that greases the skids of intercourse by proportioning levels of affect, unbending good-cheer must count as selfish, even anti-social. Though diametrically opposed to ill-humor, it is comparably disruptive, isolating as often as it affiliates, even as it promotes itself as uniquely conducive to concord. 

 

Manville’s furtive impersonation of a discombobulated hysteric comes with all the bells and whistles we expect of a Mike Leigh production, its scene-clawing theatricality bringing to mind Miriam Hopkins’ rivalry with Bette Davis in Old Acquaintance. Unfortunately, it feels only marginally more organic than that performance. Her studied depiction of inebriated dejection makes us all too aware that a thespian is plying her craft. Excesses may be the whole point of her hysterical character, yet Leigh overindulges Manville. As if we could not be trusted to appreciate that Mary is pathetic short of being completely submerged in her vacuous turbulence. 

Had Mary been less drastically personified our loyalties might have been more evenly divided. More inclusive framing would also have fostered ambiguity—the psychological corollary of the plot that keeps on giving by keeping the audience guessing. In Another Year we are less in suspense about than dreading the embarrassments certain to be visited upon us by Mary's characterologically begotten faux-pas.  

Just when we’ve had our fill of overbearing quirkiness, bumptious chub Ken (Peter Wight) makes his appearance. A compulsive snacker, he barely has time to breath as he gorges himself on Gerri’s home-cooking, slugging back alcoholic beverages with the same abandon Mary brings to the practice. His gluttony and her furtive emptiness may seem destined for symbiosis, but she spurns his graceless overtures. 

After the bleak funeral and wake of Tom's sister-in-law, Mary makes the acquaintance of her surviving husband, stoic Ronnie (David Bradley), who, though barely able to connect, has the virtue of not inducing envy in her.  

Leigh ought to try his hand at comedy given his fascination with inferior types. Yet to ascribe satirical intent to Leigh would be to misunderstand his profoundly moral vision. His focus on the implosions of disagreeable and damaged people is but a means to challenge our capacity--or preparedness--to sustain sympathy with losers. His marathons of ill-manners become trials of our capacity for object-constancy. 

Charity is a Bitch

 

At its deepest level Another Year grapples with the issue of whether we have a duty to exercise charity towards those who abuse it. It’s easy to be compassionate in good times towards congenial people. The test is to exercise hospitality towards those whose manipulative neediness puts them beyond the pale. 

 

When Mary turns up unannounced the evening Joe and Katie are expected, Gerri is confronted with a dilemma of conscience. She is anything but glad to see her, and conveys it by her matter-of-fact comportment. Her displeasure is not lost on Mary, who grows distraught. Conferring with Tom, Gerri decides she can't just “chuck her out” given her state. Besides, she concludes, “I’ve got enough food.” Their bounty obliges the Hepples to provide, however begrudgingly. 

Fearing the worst and hoping for the best, they resign themselves to including Mary., overcoming in an intimate conference their aversion to a damaged soul despite her exploitative neediness. 

Leigh stands in the English tradition that gave us the works of Austen, Elliot, and Dickens, as well as socio-realist 'kitchen-sink' cinema. A moral  tradition first and foremost--in contradistinction to the more cynical French realist unmasking of convention (mores) and the nouvelle vague's celebration of individual rebellion. It demonstrates that struggles of conscience are no less basic to narrative art than the unmasking of hypocrisy. Though the risk of tendentiousness comes with the territory, the payoffs in emotional and moral depth far outweigh it. 

The final scene exposes Mary's sad fate. It's tempting to call it her comeuppance, yet Leigh seems less intent on punishment that on revealing her shame at its point of consummation. It's hard to imagine anything more damning than to expose a character's social parasitism. 

 

In a drawn-out pan about the table revealing one guest after another, Leigh leaves us in the dark whether Mary has decided to stay or, in what would be her act of charity, cut her loses and left. We are given time to hope she's fled with her shred of dignity. That hope is dashed as she is finally revealed--(ecce homo!)--eyes downward cast, twitching in dumb dejection on the outer margins of Good Life. 

Leigh's study of bourgeois mores is a tragedy because it emplots how the unequal distribution of the capacity for happiness--and the moral incommensurability that results--manifest where the liabilities of temperament intersect with the vagaries of fortune. Sandwiched between the extremes of the involuntary, the individual 'forges his fortune'. Such is Mary's--and everyone's--assignment and hazard in life. Even filtered through the lens of the cleverest interpretive effort, non-negotiable circumstances--character and Fortune--ever defy the capacity of the individual to bend them to his will. 

Postscript:
 

It's been suggested the Heppel's generosity is a power-play to gratify their need to feel superior. Far from being exploited by Mary, they are in fact exploiting her. This extrapolation is not one that seems compelling without a) a commitment to a notion of social justice that sees the leveling all distinctions of class and privilege, regardless of individual accomplishment and responsibility, as mandatory, and b) adherence to an unmasking interpretive strategy that contradicts all manifest meanings by turning them into their opposite, usually by tracing them back to illicit strategies of domination. These interpretive agendas are intimately connected, the first availing itself of the second to redeem Mary from her self-enfeeblement and social inferiority--her oppression by an unjust system. 

Such an interpretive approach does violence to the depth of meaning conveyed on the surface of the film. The implication that Leigh’s point is not that there are inequities in society, but to reveal the fate—and guilt—of one individual eviscerated by sorrow, longing and resentment. 

 

The final shot reveals Mary isolated by her self-absorption and enviousness, unable to enter into free exchange and interpersonally irrelevant. Her anger about being excluded from the good is on everyone’s radar. Mary’s moral corruption has been made plain, her hostility disarmed. She has nowhere to hide and nothing to contribute. Is there a more searing violation of personal dignity? 

Whether Mary is Leigh’s victim raises the question of culpability: can one victimize oneself or does it take a village? Do we need to make society safe for people who invidiously compare themselves to others? Or does a therapeutic welfare state, at some point, respect that there must be limits to its ministry and leave people to their own enlightened self-interest?

Other motivations for such a retributive interpretation are, paradoxically, the Christian spiritual motif of raising up (redeeming) the lowly, as well as the currently ubiquitous conviction—the creed  of our feministically sensitized culture—that women are emblematically victims. The new orthodoxy can be observed in all facets of social life. Its goal of a just society—which amalgamates political with therapeutic, public with private, ends—is one in which guilt and shame have been banished and the right to ‘self-esteem’ trumps all other goods. Most perversely of all, envy becomes an index of social injustice, because, as we all know, society corrupts and no individual, all things being equal, would choose to feel mortified by the aspect of superior good fortune…

In one sense Mary is Leigh’s victim--as Antigone was Sophocles’, Gretchen Goethe’s, Madame Bovary Flaubert’s, Anna Karenina Tolstoy’s, etc. Authors have been sacrificing women for generations. Which suggests that it is the fate of female characters to be victims. What is a tragedy for the individual personage, is an incalculable enrichment for culture.