Come on Guy, Give up the 1/2 a Star

In Contention’s Guy Lodge wrote a thoughtful, articulate review of Mike Leigh’s Another Year. My only gripe is, really, 31/2 stars? I think it’s a four star film. But I tend towards passionate enthusiasm. I admit this to be true about myself. Not good at being a critic:

If “Happy-Go-Lucky” was a discursive thesis on the merits and challenges of making one’s own happiness, “Another Year” continues that investigation, while taking human loneliness as its essay subject. If there’s a problem here, it’s that the film might mark the divide between contented coupledom and the yearning single life a little too patly.

Or perhaps it doesn’t: the film’s mostly self-contained opening sequence, featuring a startling cameo from Imelda Staunton as a married insomniac assigned to Gerri for counselling, stands starkly at odds with the rest of the film’s advocation of togetherness: here is the film’s only character who wants to be alone, and isn’t permitted to be. “What is the one thing that would improve your life?” Gerri asks her brightly. “A different life,” comes the bitterly defiant response.

We keep expecting to follow up this story as the titular year unfolds, but we never do, just as the fates of Tom and Gerri’s rotating stream of visitors are left variously in limbo. Leigh’s deceptively harsh but supremely moving film may be a paean of sorts to togetherness, but it’s also an elegy to those we’ve let slide out of view.

How Guy managed to write something this good on four hours of sleep and a diet of cigarettes and beer I’ll never know. Wait, minus the cigarettes. Keep the beer. I don’t think there is anything pat about it. What struck me most was what Gerri says about choices. There are choices to be made – good ones and bad ones.¬† We choose our fates and we must live with those decisions. Or change. Great flick.