Another year

Mike Leigh can perhaps be compared to Woody Allen. The two veteran writer-director auteurs have been prolific commentators on family relationships. Allen concentrated on nervous intellectuals and New York Jewish sensitivities, Leigh on English working-class mores. Allen used star actors and personalities to dress up his dialogue, Leigh worked only with a repertory group of dedicated actors, improvising sketched scenes into portraits of repressed passions. Leigh's latest morality tale is an admirable cinematic miniature, Another Year. An admirable, but unlovable, display of Leigh's skill in capturing mean spirits and sad lives.

Tom (Jim Broadbent) and Gerri (Ruth Sheen) are a sweetly, happily-married late-middle-aged professional couple (civil engineer and psychiatric counsellor) with a well-adjusted sole child (Oliver Maltman) who's found a bubbly, steady girlfriend (Karina Fernandez). The older couple enjoy a simple loving relationship in humble semi-detached housing, potter around their vegetable allotment, cook ambitiously and are kind to friends and family members.

At four mealtimes during the course of a year, the constant and sometimes unwelcome presence is a hyper-tense needy secretary from Gerri's clinic, Mary (Leslie Manville). Her panic attacks over buying and trying to drive a second-hand car provide a comic storyline. The year's other major event is the death of Tom's sister-in-law and the family's trip up north to attend her funeral, console the miserable brother and cope with his alienated son. There's also a laid-back black female colleague of Gerri's and an over-the-hill university pal of Tom's who makes a messy pass for Mary, who's making messy friend-craving passes of her own to Tom's son and brother.

That's it, and it earned Leigh a Best Original Screenplay Oscar nomination in 2011. Why this particular slice of kitchen-sink posturing did so is a mystery. Its a microcosmic study of typical, almost cliched, working-class English misfits and the remarkably patient couple who let them moan and drift year by year through their own uneventful lives. The acting is immaculate, of its kind, particularly by Broadbent as an avuncular chuckler and Manville as a nervous wreck. The bonus is Imelda Staunton dead-pan cameo of a bitterly maudlin client of Gerri's.

Tom and Gerri are almost too good to be true characters, surely too sensible to have allowed their social annual round to be so hostage to other people's woes.