A Primer on Happiness: The Films of Mike Leigh
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Mike Leigh is third on my list of favorite directors (Hitchcock, Woody Allen, Mike Leigh, Alexander Payne, Catherine Hardwicke). He's best known for his Oscar-nominated Secrets and Lies, which made a star of leading actress Brenda Blethyn. His latest film, Another Year, is another great movie about the emotional lives of ordinary people.
Ever since I saw his early film Life Is Sweet, I've admired Leigh's ability to portray happy marriages. Tolstoy famously said that all happy families are alike, and writers and actors often say that flawed characters are more interesting. But Mike Leigh's films make another case: that happiness is interesting, and unhappiness just numbing.
In Another Year, the central characters are a late middle-aged couple named Jerry and Tom, a therapist and geologist with a grown son named Joe with whom they're close. The movie starts with scenes from their work life and then transitions home, where Jerry and Tom occasionally play host to friends who are struggling, most notably Mary, a colleague who wasted her youth on a married man and is facing middle age with manic despair. Leigh is completely sympathetic with these characters, showing us their charm and a glimpse of the people they could be if they could break out of their destructive behaviors. But he also shows how tiring they are---self-involved (as in a scene where Mary blows into a party and fails to notice a friend's new baby) and caught in their own repetitive scripts (Mary's continuing car crises).
The central motif in the movie is that of Jerry and Tom's garden.The movie is divided into four sections, each beginning with Jerry and Tom working in their garden at the start of the new season. In spring they plant. In summer they fertilize. In autumn they reap. In winter they tend and rest. And so it is with their lives. Being happy is really so easy. You study, you work, you pay attention, you care for others. You don't drink too much, you don't blow up at family funerals. But for those in emotional pain or chaos, these small things feel completely out of reach. Tom invites his lonely friend Ken to go on a walking tour in the north, to get him away and give him something to look forward to. But Ken can't even respond, is too paralyzed to take any action.
The movie ends on a sad note. Mary has spent most of the movie talking in her self-involved, manic way---about her car, about her troubles on the Tube, about her past. The last scene has her chastened, sitting at Jerry and Tom's dining room table with their family, Joe and his new girlfriend, listening quietly as they tell their own stories: of the interesting work they've done and the places they've seen. Whole lives full of interest and challenges. The camera moves around the table, person by person, and finally lands on Mary, who sits only half-listening, just aware of her own misery. And the voices of others at the table recede to nothing---showing just how much she's trapped in her own head.
All of the acting was superb, but I have to give a special shout-out to Jim Broadbent, who has done a million movies and is distinctive in each one. He had a lanky charm here, a loose athleticism, radiating health. But the whole cast was amazing. The girlfriend, who would have been a stick figure in most movies, is fully realized, a real, specific individual. The specificity of his characters is perhaps the most rare of Mike Leigh's many gifts.
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Mike Leigh is third on my list of favorite directors (Hitchcock, Woody Allen, Mike Leigh, Alexander Payne, Catherine Hardwicke). He's best known for his Oscar-nominated Secrets and Lies, which made a star of leading actress Brenda Blethyn. His latest film, Another Year, is another great movie about the emotional lives of ordinary people.
Ever since I saw his early film Life Is Sweet, I've admired Leigh's ability to portray happy marriages. Tolstoy famously said that all happy families are alike, and writers and actors often say that flawed characters are more interesting. But Mike Leigh's films make another case: that happiness is interesting, and unhappiness just numbing.
In Another Year, the central characters are a late middle-aged couple named Jerry and Tom, a therapist and geologist with a grown son named Joe with whom they're close. The movie starts with scenes from their work life and then transitions home, where Jerry and Tom occasionally play host to friends who are struggling, most notably Mary, a colleague who wasted her youth on a married man and is facing middle age with manic despair. Leigh is completely sympathetic with these characters, showing us their charm and a glimpse of the people they could be if they could break out of their destructive behaviors. But he also shows how tiring they are---self-involved (as in a scene where Mary blows into a party and fails to notice a friend's new baby) and caught in their own repetitive scripts (Mary's continuing car crises).
The central motif in the movie is that of Jerry and Tom's garden.The movie is divided into four sections, each beginning with Jerry and Tom working in their garden at the start of the new season. In spring they plant. In summer they fertilize. In autumn they reap. In winter they tend and rest. And so it is with their lives. Being happy is really so easy. You study, you work, you pay attention, you care for others. You don't drink too much, you don't blow up at family funerals. But for those in emotional pain or chaos, these small things feel completely out of reach. Tom invites his lonely friend Ken to go on a walking tour in the north, to get him away and give him something to look forward to. But Ken can't even respond, is too paralyzed to take any action.
The movie ends on a sad note. Mary has spent most of the movie talking in her self-involved, manic way---about her car, about her troubles on the Tube, about her past. The last scene has her chastened, sitting at Jerry and Tom's dining room table with their family, Joe and his new girlfriend, listening quietly as they tell their own stories: of the interesting work they've done and the places they've seen. Whole lives full of interest and challenges. The camera moves around the table, person by person, and finally lands on Mary, who sits only half-listening, just aware of her own misery. And the voices of others at the table recede to nothing---showing just how much she's trapped in her own head.
All of the acting was superb, but I have to give a special shout-out to Jim Broadbent, who has done a million movies and is distinctive in each one. He had a lanky charm here, a loose athleticism, radiating health. But the whole cast was amazing. The girlfriend, who would have been a stick figure in most movies, is fully realized, a real, specific individual. The specificity of his characters is perhaps the most rare of Mike Leigh's many gifts.
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