Another Year (2010)

Another Year is presented season by season starting with Spring...and I thought, halfway through. "oh no! we've still got Fall and Winter to go!"

Tom and Gerri are a married couple in their late 50s/early 60s and they still enjoy each other's company. The problem is that this is less about Tom and Gerri, who simply serve as an anchor, than about the desperately needy and bordering-on-manic Mary. I simply don't know anyone like Mary -- but that might be because I instinctively walk the other way if I meet anyone even half as self-centered as she is. I could barely take her drunken whining for the duration of the film, so the prospect of actually having her be an interloper into my private life for an entire year would make me seriously contemplate moving (though, to be fair, Tom and Gerri had had enough of her by Autumn, too).

As Gary said on the way out of the theater, "It might be a slice of life, but what's interesting about this particular slice of this particular life?" Personally, I was interested in the life of Imelda Staunton's depressed housewife, introduced at the beginning of the story only to vanish after her second scene. I kept hoping she'd come back.

C