Random Image

Another Year

by prudence on 28-Jan-2011
I mentioned in my previous post that I'd seen the movie Another Year.

Can't rate it highly enough. Superbly observed. A chunk straight out of England, with pitch-perfect dialogue and spot-on characterization.

It's a sobering, thoughtful slice of aging life, presented in a way that is very, very moving without ever being sentimental or cliched.

It leaves you wondering: how do we make our choices, as human beings?

The unfortunately named Tom and Gerry have clearly got something -- a resilient marriage built on good memories and the little day-to-day things that we do and share together. But there's no suggestion of a magic bullet that procured that. It's been, presumably, a lifetime of making what have turned out to be the right choices, along with, presumably, a lot of luck and socioeconomic ballast.

Mary and Ken, on the other hand, have both lost their way at some point. Maybe their fault, maybe not. But one wrong move, one wrong choice, and you're stuck with an awful lot of consequences that are hard to shift -- loneliness, exhibitionism, alcoholism, depression, and a terrible propensity to make more bad choices. You pick the dodgy car. You ignore the human being who IS on offer because you're weaving a bizarre fantasy about the one who never can be. You make too many demands of the people who are your only friends.

How little some of that generation are able to articulate their feelings. Ronnie, for example, hardly says anything about the death of his wife -- he has that heartbreaking pursed look that I remember from older members of my family. And how little the ones who CAN articulate -- twenty to the dozen -- are able to take a good hard look at their lives. Mary is capable of only extreme constructions of her life -- the optimistic and ridiculously untrue, and the truthful but unbearably negative -- and can't seem to get the pendulum to settle anywhere near the middle, where most of us are forced to try to find our sanity.

The final scene belongs to the young people. And Mary is already in a kind of death.

Fantastic, thought-provoking, agonizingly poignant cinema. Bravo.