Review: Another Year

Review: Another Year

Rating: ***1/2

Nonna's Rating: $$$

Rotten Tomatoes: 92%

Audience: 75%

Jim Broadbent (Tom) and Ruth Sheen (Gerri) play an older, comfortable, still-very-much-in-love couple with a grown son Joe (Oliver Mortman). The film covers four seasons of a year in their life, seasons in which they are visited repeatedly by Mary (Lesley Manville) a close friend who does clerical work in Gerri's psychotherapy office.

Tom and Gerri are the strong center of the story. Mary revolves around them: divorced, aging, desperate, and drinking too much. Gerri tries to fix her up with another friend, Ken (Peter Wight), but Mary is repulsed by this older, mess of a man who also drinks too much. Instead, she flirts with Joe, twenty years her junior and is devastated when Joe, to his parents' delight, brings home the girl he just might marry.

Not much happens over the course of the year. Things stay pretty much the same for Tom and Gerri. And Mary just continues her downward spiral. Superb acting sustains the film. The performances are almost too real -- especially Mary's. And just when I thought, "Wait. Gerri is a psychotherapist. Why is she enabling Mary's alcoholism," Gerri gently made it very clear to Mary that she would no longer play the non-confrontational ever-patient, tolerant friend.

Nothing much happens in this film. Nothing is resolved Life just goes on for another year.

Nonna's Ratings:

$$$$ = Worth paying the Friday evening price
$$$= Worth paying the Matinee price

$$= Worth a rental
$ = Wait for cable
# = Skip it