I won’t kid you. I was disappointed in spending two hours watching “Another Year.” I know many critics just loved this character study (I thought I would, too, judging from other reviews), but instead I found it rather dull. I think people in the theater kept politely waiting for something of note to happen but in fact nothing ever did. There was one person who stood up in the theater not too long into it and I heard say I can’t take it anymore and walked out. I’m not sure if there was something in particular the person was talking about or just the entire thing. Little did I know at that early stage they were quite right. At times it felt like grass growing.
But perhaps I’m just not the right person for Mike Leigh films as others seem to be. I plan not to sit through another. Yet I do very much like small indie films but just didn’t find a lot in this film, which is about the year in the life of a middle-aged British married couple. The married couple seem quite happy with each other but are surrounded by friends and family who are unhappy in their love lives or singledom. One of their friends in particular, Mary, who seems to be a sad sort of train wreck, garners a lot of focus of the movie. We see her desperately latch onto the happy couple in a pathetic kind of way to try to ease her misery, but she grows quite annoying to them and to us.
All the actors are quite excellent in their roles. I have no quibbles with them. They paint an intimate portrait of this couple and the people close to them. It’s just that the movie doesn’t seem to go anywhere, nothing really seems to happen. It’s too slow. The married couple at the center are happy, and the single folks around them are sort of sad sacks, a viewpoint that gets a bit tiresome after awhile. For once at the end, I couldn’t wait for all the credits to roll, I didn’t want to spend another moment on “Another Year.”
