Another Year

                     

ANOTHER YEAR                 B                                                                                                       Great Britain  (129 mi)  2010  ‘Scope  d:  Mike Leigh  

It’s interesting how, over the years, Mike Leigh has continued to utilize new faces as his leads, pulled from among his staple of performers, almost as if he’s rotating the importance of their roles.  Ruth Sheen and Lesley Manville, faces we recognize as they are among the most loyal in his entire troupe, have finally been given prominent roles.  Jim Broadbent (4th film together) goes back to LIFE IS SWEET (1990), while Ruth Sheen (5th film) and Lesley Manville (6th film) go back to HIGH HOPES (1988).  This film centers around the stable lives of suburbanites Tom and Gerri, Broadbent and Sheen, both working professionals who earn a comfortable living, as much of the film takes place inside their home.  Added to the mix is the harried and unsettled life of Mary (Manville), a woman who works as a secretary in the same building with Gerri but who’s always in a state of flux, a heavy drinker who’s desperately in need of getting into someone’s ear where she can blab with the best of them.  Mary is a vulnerable and sympathetic figure who wears her heart on her sleeve while being affectionate and overly man friendly, but is younger and lacks good judgment, making rash, impulsive decisions which contrasts with the polish and sophistication of the married couple who simply lead more orderly lives, which usually requires hearing the latest disasters that Mary continually finds herself in.  Nonetheless, there’s a somewhat breezy tone set by the ease of conversation that flows when they’re together.  This is countered by the dour opening sequence featuring the familiar face of Imelda Staunton, stonefaced here as a woman who is seeking medical help for sleepless nights.  When she’s referred to a counselor (Sheen), it’s clear she’s so set in her ways that she couldn’t possibly budge an inch either way if she tried.  When asked to rate how happy she is from 1 to 10, she immediately identifies with a 1, knowing there’s absolutely nothing she can do about it.   While the opening is pronounced and starkly bleak, it quickly settles into the more comfortable conversations typified by backyard gatherings where the flow of food, wine or beer keeps the guests happy. 

The structure of the film is told with the passing seasons, broken by a familiar scene of Tom and Gerri spending their afternoons tending to their section of a communal garden, where they’re constantly bringing new vegetables to plant, an outdoor hobby they obviously both share, bringing rubber boots as they’re up to their knees in mud.  Like a greatest hits album, the progression of the year is shown through the careful selection of a few scenes from each season, where with scant narrative detail, relationships change, as we see someone fall in love, someone die, or someone have their hopes dashed.  Behavior is noticeably different, where the audience is treated to the development of character through long sequences, as lives unfold before our eyes in real time.  This is not one of Leigh’s more deeply intense and troubling films, as there’s a jovial and lighthearted atmosphere with plenty of broad humor, but it’s surprising how much depth he’s able to squeeze out of ordinary lives, where the points of view of the characters shift radically over time, oftentimes beginning with subtle shifts of tone which have more serious ramifications through the passage of time.  Little things escalate and become overwhelming obstacles when seen from someone else’s point of view. 

The audience may laugh at the easy going nature or apparent silliness of an earlier scene, where the laughter turns to pathos when seen later in a different context, when the effervescent smiles have changed dramatically to quiet stares, accompanied by an emotional paralysis, where the easy earlier flow of conversation comes to an abrupt stop.  These are literally scenes that may leave the audience speechless, as the razor sharp precision of Mike Leigh’s sleight-of-hand theatricality hasn’t lost any of its depth or profundity.  This is simply a subtler version of what we’ve seen before, where the age of the characters onscreen may have something to do with it, where ordinary lives change dramatically, oftentimes without the slightest notice, where by the time one figures it out, it’s probably much too late.  In fact, the entire tone of the film turns on that final shot, which brings into question the supposedly kindly motives of Tom and Gerri, now seen strictly as snobbish professionals, unlikable people really who don’t have the same patience anymore for someone like Mary, who is seen as a nuisance from a lower class who never seems to get her harried life in order.  This is Chekhovian drama without the fireworks, but these characters onscreen are completely familiar to us by the finale, and when Leigh slows down the pace to a glacial crawl, eliminating all the superficial frivolity, the emotional impact is devastating, paralleling that opening sequence with Imelda Staunton.     

Welcome to the Punch

WELCOME TO THE PUNCH           C    
USA  Great Britain  (100 mi)  2013  d:  Eran Creevy  

This is exactly the kind of action movie America exports around the world, where popcorn entertainment is seen as a blur of action sequences and no character development, so is there any surprise when one decides to send a movie back in exactly the same style—lesson learned:  this is how to make a lot of money.  While this was made on a measly $8.5 million dollar budget, one can envision this director making Hollywood movies on several hundred million dollar budgets.  In this case, it’s all about non-stop action, which translates to money, and the director’s personal drive and ambition to cash in while he can, as there’s nothing remotely new or original about the movie itself, but it’s designed to resemble the big Hollywood blockbuster by transplanting the Hong Kong action thriller with bullets flying in all directions to a setting in Great Britain.  The film wastes no time, opening with a terrific chase sequence, one angry guy in a car, Detective Inspector Max Lewinsky (James McAvoy), and 4 hooded and masked men in black, like THE MATRIX (1999), driving in formation on motorcycles, where the cyclists get away, but not before one of them is unmasked, Mark Strong as Jacob Sternwood, putting a bullet in Max’s knee, just enough to incapacitate him for the ultimate getaway.  The film jumps forward three years and Max is still fuming over allowing this consummate criminal (who was involved in some kind of heist) to slip through his fingers, where the police department relegates him to a secondary role with his partner, detective Sarah Hawks (Andrea Riseborough), afraid to let him get too close to the action.  We can see his personal life is a mess, his home in shambles, and his knee requires regular injections just to keep active and mobile, but despite his psychological funk, he’s still obviously hampered by the limitations from his shattered leg.  With a muddled narrative that never intends on making things clear, this is a style over substance film, using plenty of computer graphic images of the city illuminated at night, given a very futuristic look. 

While his insightful partner Hawks is aware that Max is distracted, the police are thwarted in an attempt to raid Sternwood’s mountain retreat in Iceland, then after he eludes their grasp, they hope to lure him out of hiding and snare him at the hospital visiting his wounded son, shot under mysterious circumstances.  The entire film is set in a noirish atmosphere of pervasive trouble, where the department itself has gotten itself into the murky waters of a corrupt political election, as the police commissioner (David Morrissey) has acquiesced to a secret deal contracting weapons from a shady British military contractor backing a law and order candidate, none of which is above board.  In fact, the connection to the weapons firm is a shadowy underworld figure, ex-military man Dean Warns (Johnny Harris), whose carefully chosen random acts of violence are designed to create a climate of societal fear that helps the chosen candidate get elected.  Fully unaware of this scheme, Max remains obsessed with the idea that Sternwood is the root of all evil.  Accordingly, he fails to see the unexpected danger that blindsides one of the lead characters, one of the first signs that this movie could be more than it is, as this is one of the better secondary figures, but instead of enlarge the character, no one comes to the rescue, as apparently all are expendable, casting this movie instead into a fatalistic cloud of gloom.  In fact, the body is moved to Max’s apartment to make it appear he’s the killer, which makes him quickly deviate from any intended plan, where this movie quickly takes a choreographic turn into a blitzkrieg assault of non-stop bullets in scene after scene, where Sternwood and Warns are usually in the middle of it, with Max more than a little confused, as his arch enemy Sternwood continues to pull him out of deadly situations, where he’s damned if he (or the audience) can understand why.       

Sternwood’s ace in the hole is his partner in crime Roy (Peter Mullan), another sociopath on the loose that with an automatic weapon in his hands can be put to good use.  This is the extent of character development in this movie, as it’s a brilliant cast, but outside of one extremely British drawing room scene, one with deadly and comical overtones, there are simply no memorable characters, as nearly everyone ends up dead.  But the scene of the film is when a heavily armed Roy, Sternwood, and Max all show up in the living room of Warns’s mother (Ruth Sheen, from Mike Leigh’s staple of actors), who’s convinced these are her son’s old army buddies, so they all sit around the sofa with Mom, nice and cozy sipping tea, so when Warns arrives, everyone’s hiding the gun they have pointed at someone else as they have a pleasant family chat.  This picture of family bliss is of course fractured by another dizzying array of bullets, the same image that punctuates nearly every scene, where the point of it all, one supposes, is to apparently stage unending gunfights, like the Wild West, where the electric synth score by Harry Escott sounds like it was written by John Carpenter, easily the best thing in the film.  If only more *felt* like John Carpenter, who loved and adored his eccentric characters, giving them plenty of room to operate.  But everything here is secondary to the battle of bullets, becoming an endless cliché, where the last man standing feels more like LA CONFIDENTIAL (1997), where a lone gunman seemingly takes on the entire corrupt wing of the police force, which has become an elite army operation of nonstop criminal activities.  In each, the finale feels like total chaos, like there’s no police force left to belong to, as the entire operation is on the take.  McAvoy is good as the constantly befuddled Max, one man against the world, but Mark Strong is better as Sternwood, always focused and under control, whose dominant outlaw presence becomes the moral center of the picture.