Another Year: All in good time

Seasons pass, the garden’s tended, visitors come and go. “Nothing changes,” sighs one of our ensemble of mostly middle-aged, middle-class Londoners, though that’s not always bad news where certain cinematic yields are concerned. Honestly, I’m not sure that any new ground is broken in writer/director Mike Leigh’s latest multi-character study, yet it somehow feels fresh anyway. Another Year is chatty and rambling, busy yet plot-free, tender yet merciless about how life can just keep getting more unruly and incomprehensible, and, despite a number of chronically anxious, substance-abusing or otherwise depressed supporting characters—not to mention a harp-heavy score from Gary Yershon that creeps into New Ageyness—it’s also very, very funny.

Tom and Gerri (those sturdiest of Leigh vets, Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen), a chipper geologist and warmly maternal psychologist respectively, are the film’s collective rock. Lucky to have each other, they’re not flawless people, yet each possesses that rare gift for contentment, so much so that you might find yourself wondering if, like Leigh’s recent Happy-Go-Lucky, their story mightn’t become another cautionary tale about the tyranny of the well-adjusted. The film is built around the couple’s hosting at least four festive gatherings and a funeral. At nearly every one of these occasions Mary (Lesley Manville, mannered yet so precise) turns up, merrily envies her patient friends, gets plastered, and only gradually learns not to put the moves on their son (Oliver Maltman). Perhaps she needs someone to help, and she might just find it in an ashen widower (David Bradley) who looks like Motörhead’s Lemmy if Lemmy were a vampire. Good old Ken (Peter Wright) meanwhile may not ever learn to moderate his food intake, nor to stop two-fisting the lager, nor recover his unobstructed view of his own lap, but there’s always hope. Such things take time. Fortunately, Another Year is so pleasurable and sometimes touching that you won’t be in a hurry.

Royal chore: The Young Victoria

“Do you ever feel like a chess piece yourself, in a game being played against your will?” Posed to rabbity and moustachioed Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha (Rupert Friend) by soon-to-be teen Queen Victoria (Emily Blunt), it’s a sort of trick question, what with Albert being a thus-far fumblingly ingratiating suitor.

The question’s also intended as an indicator of Victoria’s inner turmoil—on the cusp of attaining unfathomable power, she’s still required to hold someone’s hand every time she mounts a staircase—yet like so much of what’s said throughout The Young Victoria, it hardly needs to be spoken aloud. Victoria’s sense of entrapment has been made abundantly clear in the scenes that preceded this one, which literally transpires over a chess board no less, with each of Victoria’s key oppressors, including mom (Miranda Richardson), looking on.

But it also feels like a trick question posed from one actor to another. Friend and Blunt were surely perfectly willing and handsomely remunerated participants in this lavish costume ball in search of a durable narrative thread, yet regardless of their individual merits as actors there’s no mistaking their ultimate usefulness as pretty objects to be played with and re-positioned in one terribly fraught and over-calculated scene after another. There is after all much history to plow through here, and the filmmakers don’t have time for such unruly forces as spontaneity, tension or nuance to get in the way.

So much of The Young Victoria is consumed with expository voice-over, expository letter reading and expository dialogue. Exposition usually serves a story, but in this case there’s just as much exposition as there is story. It’s hard to believe that the film, so often stiff, draggy and dull, was written by Julian Fellowes, the same fellow who scripted Gosford Park, a movie characterized by looseness, mischief and misdirection. Of course that movie was directed by Robert Altman, whose special genius incorporated those precise traits. What a different tone we find under the charge of Québécois director Jean-Marc Vallée, whose C.R.A.Z.Y. was so plagued with flashy, humdrum set-pieces, and who here seems far less engaged with the material and far less discriminate as to what to do with it. There are a few silly, show-offy effects that recall Vallée’s earlier cause célèbre—a scene where every hair on Miranda Richardson’s arm suddenly stands at attention is distracting mainly because I never imagined Richardson was so hirsute—but mostly this is buttoned-down, business-like, with every event heavily telegraphed, and the evocation of Victoria and Albert’s youthful love so repressed it’s positively, well, Victorian.

The cast is largely quite strong, with Blunt less sexy than usual yet imperious and vulnerable, very good with the small transitions such as the one where she resolves to be less emasculating to her husband—of course that’s after he takes a bullet for her. Paul Bettany as Lord Melbourne, the rejected corner of the movie’s political love triangle, is suitably charming and an intriguingly self-assured presence amidst all the pomp, his posture often less than erect, his hands in search of a piece of furniture to pat as he doles out sound if conservative and slyly cynical advice to the inexperienced new Queen. Jim Broadbent looks ridiculous and is an utter hoot as the outspoken King William, who unfortunately dies pretty early in the picture. Richardson would probably be great if she had more to do. Friend I’m not sure what to make of. He mostly longs for Victoria, then finally gets her and the honeymoon’s over in short shrift and he becomes hard to like. He could surely have been less mousy. But I don’t know how any actors, however talented, are supposed to do their work effectively when every scene in ultimately drowned in a score as buoyancy-sucking as that of Ilan Eshkeri’s. You’d think he’d been asked to compose music for the goddamned coronation.

Like father, like son, like, could these two just get it over with and hug already?

Based on the poet Blake Morrison’s memoir of (nearly) the same name, When Did You Last See Your Father? should at least get a few extra points for never once in its duration leading us to believe it to be anything other than exactly what it is: a middlebrow tearjerker positively hell bent on getting two grown men to hug. Two Englishmen, no less. But what the hell. Hugging men aren’t so bad, you know, and most fathers that I’ve ever known really are this difficult to connect with, and, perhaps most importantly, with actors as strong as these it’s actually kind of a pleasure to be so shamelessly manipulated.

Alternating between a present-tense narrative that finds the 40ish Blake grappling with his father Arthur’s rapidly approaching death and flashbacks that show the child Blake struggling with Arthur’s always chipper verbal abuse (his nickname for his son is “fat head”), general neglect, barely concealed philandering, unnerving cheapness and baldly ingratiating ways, David Nicholls’ script works toward its catharsis through the steady building of Blake’s conflicting urges toward keeping a well-earned grudge and reconciling with an old man that everyone else seems to have been able to forgive. I haven’t read Morrison’s book, but it seems like Nicholls made some pretty sound selections of episodes to flesh out here, like the disastrous father-son camping trip that functions as a string of small betrayals while providing for a great deal of humour and character development. We learn enough about each of these guys over the course of the film to appreciate both of their perspectives regardless of how much we can sympathize with them.

Colin Firth and Jim Broadbent are in reality only 11-years apart, but Firth’s seething anger and general vitality set against Broadbent’s jowly expressiveness and decidedly old-fashioned charms go a long way toward forming a convincing generation gap. In fact they make a wonderful pair, one over-sensitive, the other gleefully oblivious, the both of them strikingly capable of casual cruelties. Broadbent kind of steals the show, making all the jokes and recklessly driving the scenes toward their necessary confrontations, but I found myself admiring Firth all the more for holding his own in spite of this. When Did You Last See Your Father? could have been deadly were some simpering, overbearingly earnest actor cast as Blake, but Firth makes no great show of his character’s resentment or self-assignation as the story’s token victim. His natural warmth makes for a lovely balance with Blake’s maturation into a sexual bully with a short fuse, a son who, however determined to do otherwise, is in danger of repeating his father’s worst mistakes, only without the fun.

If only director Anand Tucker (Hilary & Jackie) had the same light touch. His direction is fussy, suffocatingly tasteful, overly cutty and burdened with some creaky visual metaphors, especially his use of mirrors to impart the deeper similarities between father and son. I have to give Tucker credit however for not lingering over Arthur’s deathbed to soak up every last drop of pathos, something plenty of other directors would have leapt at the chance to do. The real guilty party with regards to bathetic overkill would have to be composer Barrington Pheloung, a Tucker regular, whose godawful score rushes ahead of the imagery, the actors, and us, to telegraph every last emotional cue in the film. The result is, of course, the reverse of what is presumably intended: we can’t actually feel as much because the music is too busy telling us what to feel instead of letting us find it. You might want to just sit back and pretend the music’s coming from the sound system of some annoying neighbour, and enjoy watching Firth, Broadbent, et al make the discoveries on their own.