A bittersweet mix of merriment and melancholia from writer-director Mike Leigh, who seems to suggest that the right balance of those two elements can bring about something resembling contentment. The film centers around Tom and Gerri (Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen), a loving, in-love sixtyish couple whose home is a place of refuge for various lost souls. Primary among them is Mary (Lesley Manville), Gerri’s distressed, alcoholic coworker, a divorced secretary who is desperate for companionship of any kind. Set (rather obviously) against the four seasons as they fall upon the tiny garden that Tom and Gerri tend, Another Year is a quiet movie tracing quiet lives, each marked by their own sort of human desperation.
