miércoles, 29 de diciembre de 2010

Injustice, British and Otherwise

MOVIE REVIEW

Another Year

Simon Mein/Sony Pictures Classics

“Another Year”: Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen play a happy couple surrounded by less fulfilled souls in this film, which opens on Wednesday in Manhattan.

Injustice, British and Otherwise

By A. O. SCOTT

Published: December 28, 2010

Class consciousness has frequently played a role in Mike Leigh’s films, and not only because, as a storyteller whose native terrain is modern Britain, he can hardly hope to avoid it. And sure enough, the observant viewer of his splendidly rich and wise new feature, “Another Year,” will notice the shadows that an always-evolving system of social hierarchy casts over the passage of the seasons. (“We’re all graduates,” one character reminds another, with the prickly pride of belonging to the first generation to receive a university education in an era of expanded opportunity.)

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Times Topic: Mike Leigh

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Simon Mein/Sony Pictures Classics

Lesley Manville, above, plays a character who is needy, insecure and prone to drink too much.

But in this movie, as in its immediate precursor, “Happy-Go-Lucky,” Mr. Leigh is also after a more elusive and troubling form of injustice, one that is almost cosmically mysterious even as it penetrates, and sometimes threatens to poison, the relationships that make up everyday life.

Like “Happy-Go-Lucky,” though on a somewhat larger scale, “Another Year” is about the unequal distribution of happiness. Why do some people — like Tom and Gerri, the post-’60s 60-something couple at the center of this episodic story — seem to have an inexhaustible, even superabundant supply, while others seem unable to acquire even the smallest portion? Can happiness be borrowed, stolen or inherited? Is it earned by meritorious works or granted by the obscure operations of grace?

These may sound like silly, abstract questions, but they could hardly be more serious or more relevant. Here in America, after all, the pursuit of happiness has the status of a foundational right, coincident, but not quite identical, with material prosperity. In Britain, where dourness can seem to be as much a part of the stereotypical national character as bad food, foul weather and precise distinctions of status, the assertion of a right to be happy can seem almost revolutionary.

Certainly Poppy, the antically joyful heroine of “Happy-Go-Lucky,” was a radically free spirit, almost violent in her expressions of good feeling. Tom and Gerri, played with uncanny subtlety and tremendous soul by Jim Broadbentand Ruth Sheen, are much more subdued but no less radiant, and just as extreme in their delight. Their long, comfortable marriage seems to have unfolded without serious friction or disappointment.

Tom is a geologist who lends his expertise to public works projects in London and abroad, and whose professional enthusiasm combines a craftsman’s pride in handiwork with a nerd’s glee at knowing stuff. Gerri is a therapist who counsels patients at a clinic, one of them a lower-middle-class housewife (played by Imelda Staunton, the star of Mr. Leigh’s“Vera Drake”), whose bottomless despair is the complete reverse of Gerri’s fulfillment.

The film’s more complicated and sustained contrast is between Gerri and Mary, her co-worker and longtime friend, played by Lesley Manville with the kind of wrenching, borderline-unbearable lack of self-protective actorly vanity that reminds you that, however gentle it may seem, this is still a Mike Leigh film. In other words, the spectacle of humiliation that takes place when uncomfortable self-consciousness turns into its opposite is never far away. Such mortal embarrassment stalks Mary, who is needy, insecure and prone to drink too much, and also Ken (Peter Wight), an old chum of Tom’s who packs the same traits into a large, shambling masculine frame.

In their company, Tom and Gerri are patient, kind and nonjudgmental, offering advice and encouragement and overlooking behavior that might make less generous spirits cringe. But their goodness is so thorough that it may inspire some unkind thoughts. Do they associate with Mary and Ken out of genuine affection, or because spending time with such miserable types makes them feel (and look) better? Is their tolerant solicitude a form of complacency? And is “Another Year” therefore not a loving portrait of the modern liberal temperament but rather a quietly seething indictment of its nose-in-the-air narcissism?