Review: 'Another Year' explores the nature of happiness

What makes people happy? Genetics? Luck? Does it come from within or from the quality of relationships surrounding us?

Director Mike Leigh wrestles with these questions in ‘Another Year’ and yet surprisingly enough, this is a movie completely without any discernible plot or message. What it does have is rich and complex character studies, excellent acting and complete respect for the viewer’s ability to observe, learn and begin answering these questions for themselves. I cannot tell you how absorbed I was by this slightly dark, but uncommonly real look into the lives of ordinary people made significant only by their own inner self-worth, or complete lack thereof.

In ‘Another Year’ we follow over the course of four seasons a very ordinary elderly London couple, Tom and Gerri (Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen), who find deep bliss in their own companionship, in their respective work - he is a geological engineer and she a counsellor - and in their shared passion for gardening. They also warmly open their middle-class ramshackle home to their less happy friends and family who are drawn to them like bees to honey.

One such friend is the desperately lonely Mary (Lesley Manville), a 50+ secretary who works with Gerri and who dresses like a twenty-year old. Mary sucks down wine by the bottle as well as more than her fair share of life energy from the kindly Tom and Gerri. Mary babbles on endlessly about inconsequential matters, she is your typical suburban diva, the kind who dramatizes her life constantly as a way of investing it with meaning.

Mary meets her counterpart in the equally depressed and lost Ken (Peter Wight), an old friend of the Tom who feels as if life has completely passed him by. Food, drink and cigarettes are used to constantly sate his desire for significance, but he is an endless conveyor belt of unfulfilment. Mary tells Gerri she is disgusted by Ken’s bulk but it would be more likely she is frightened off by his similarities to her. Instead she turns her desperate desire for connection onto Tom and Gerri’s thirty-year-old son Joe (Oliver Maltman), who endures her clumsy flirting for the sake of his parents, and because of his own kindly nature.

Leigh works with only the barest of scripts, preferring his actors to really live the roles and to improvise. It is only after months of rehearsals and improvisation that he will film, which is probably why the characters and situations seem so real and so lived in. It also makes their anger, pain and sadness feel so similar to what happens behind closed doors for every group of family and friends. The final closing scene where for the first time in the movie Mary is still and listens to others, and the expression on her face as she does so touched me deeply. It is a mundane, everyday moment that morphed into one of piercing emotional effect because of the keenness of its observation. It is the kind of moment we walk past everyday without even really noticing, and perhaps, we are poorer because of it. The real impact of this movie is that its characters are never set apart from us, they are us.

So what is the secret of happiness then? Well, Leigh doesn’t tell us but he does expect us to learn something from Tom and Gerri’s ordinariness made significant only by their contentment and inner security, as much as he does from the striking sadness of those who cannot connect with others because they cannot find the inner peace to do so.

Four (and a half) stars out of five.

Review: Why 'The Way Back' gets a little lost

The fact that “The Way Back” is only loosely adapted from a historically unreliable and largely discredited memoir by Slavomir Rawicz ultimately proves to be its major weakness. If this story was true, then it would be amazing enough to gloss over the uneven pacing present throughout Peter Weir’s film adaptation. If people really had trekked 6500 kilometres from a Siberian Gulag prison camp into India, travelling through gruelling conditions, harsh terrain and the most horrifying deprivations, then we could forgive the lack of compelling characterisation and story because the historical veracity would speak loudly enough to fill the gaps. However, since this never actually happened, a potentially great story is relegated to being merely a good one - enjoyable, but nowhere near as gripping as it could have been. As it should have been.

The movie opens in 1940 Russia with a Polish army officer named Janusz (Jim Sturgess) being betrayed by his wife after Soviet Communists beat a confession against him out of her. Condemned as a spy, Janusz is transported to a freezing Siberian prison camp where he meets up with an imprisoned actor who outlines an escape plan. The actor is more of a talker than a doer, so Janusz ends up escaping during a snow blizzard with some other prisoners. These prisoners include a mysterious American known only as Mr. Smith (Ed Harris), a psychopath criminal named Valka (Colin Farrell), and a few others. Thus begins an epic journey of thousands of miles in which not all of them will survive. Along the way they are joined by a young Polish women named Irene (Saoirse Ronan) who joins them on their quest for freedom.

Weir certainly does justice to the journey itself, through a superb combination of wide and magnificent sweeping landscape views, to some rather raw and visceral narrowed down shots of the group struggling to hold onto their humanity as they starve, freeze and generally suffer to the very limits of human endurance. This is the one issue Weir interrogates really well as when men see birds and wolves tearing at carrion and then run to gorge themselves on it in similar fashion, then how much of themselves do they lose in the process? Or do they gain something by being humbled and reminded of their essential humanity and their kinship with other animals? The savage effects of the journey are never hidden from us, as we see characters slowly being stripped away by the harshness of life in the wild until there is not enough of them left to carry on. They wither and fade into the icy snow, or disintegrate to the point they are swept away like so much dust in the wild, desert winds.

This is where I am brought back to my original point: That because this story did not really happen, the emotional effect of any decline and loss is almost completely flattened out. Much time is taken up watching others journey and suffer, but almost no time is spent getting to know them and building any sense of connection. Other than Jim Sturgess himself, and the Polish lass who has a few deeply touching scenes with the always effective Ed Harris, the rest of the characters are neither here nor there. Colin Farrell’s Russian criminal only stands out because he is given a little more screen time, although Farrell does the character no justice with his over the top portrayal.

Don’t get me wrong, “The Way Back” is a better than average movie, but it does seem to get a little lost on its own particular journey. There is much to commend it but I guess after movies like ‘The Truman Show’ and ‘Master and Commander,’ one begins to expect more from Peter Weir. Three (and a half) stars out of five.

Review: Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides

Four years since he last minced onto the big screen as Cap’n Jack Sparrow, Johnny Depp is back reprising one of the most iconic roles of the last decade.

The last ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ hinted it was the closing chapter of a trilogy, so it was somewhat of a surprise to hear a fourth was being made, although mercifully without the rather bland pairing of Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley, who presumably were told to take a long walk off a short plank.

What is even more surprising is that Hollywood would risk a fourth, since by the end of the trilogy the whole franchise was tired, but true to any good pirate adventure, it seems that money is the real motivation behind Disney’s decision to continue their most successful movie franchise ever.

The plot involves a convoluted chase after the ‘Fountain of Youth’ (is Hollywood lampooning themselves here or not?) where Sparrow is pitted against his old nemesis Captain Barbossa (a brilliant Geoffrey Rush), as well as the Spanish navy and the ‘pirate other pirates most fear’ in Blackbeard (Ian McShane). Thrown into the mix is the fiery Angelica (the Oscar winning Penelope Cruz) who almost manages to out-swashbuckle even the renowned Sparrow.

Talking about Jack Sparrow, has there ever been a more original character? How does Depp pull off someone so unbelievably off-the-wall and yet never make him hammy? The full impact of Depp’s performance can be appreciated if you consider one simple question: ‘Just how boring would these movies be if Depp had played the character straight?’

Even with that in mind, the honest truth is that the Pirate movies don’t offer a whole lot more than endless crazy action scenes interspersed with Depp kookiness, and as entertaining as that sounds it can start to feel a little thin after a while.

All four of the main actors provide acting punch and star quality, while new director Robb Marshall does bring something fresh with a slightly darker ‘Pirates’ (including the scariest Mermaids I have ever seen).

What little dialogue is squeezed in is generally excellent - I suspect one or two lines may become cult classics over time. Watch out for a stunning guest appearance from Rolling Stone’s Keith Richards, who plays Jack’s pirate father.

The idealistic clergyman played by Sam Claflin provides Sparrow his straight man foil but also generally represents faith in a surprisingly positive light, especially set up against the typical ‘Spanish Inquisition’ style bad guys they are battling against.

There is nothing brilliant in version 4 of 'Pirates' other than Depp being Depp, and it certainly won’t teach you anything or leave lasting impressions, although it does take the task of entertaining you seriously. In truth, it is much like the theme park ride at Disney World that it is based upon - it will take you on a hair-raising journey, but will drop you off at exactly the same point it picked you up - just a little more breathless than before.

Two and a half stars out of five.

Movies with Meaning: 'Get Low' manages to hit some real high points

Lewis Smedes oft-quoted statement “To forgive is to set a prisoner free and discover that the prisoner was you,” could have been written with ‘Get Low’ in mind. Except that the forgiveness the central character struggles to deliver in this profoundly moving film is towards no one else but himself.

Robert Duvall plays a cantankerous old hermit named Felix Bush, who forty years previously failed to save the love of his life from a burning house. Now living in the 1930‘s Bush literally makes himself a prisoner of his own inability to self-forgive; he judges that his failure means he has no right to enjoy a normal life with family and loved ones, and so spends decades shut away as a total recluse. He refuses the comforts of social companionship and holes himself up in his property just outside a rural Tennessee community.

Bush stoically weathers both the vicious rumours surrounding him and the deep-rooted suspicion that he is regarded with by the local townspeople. That is until he figures a worsening heart condition means his death is imminent and decides to clear his name. Bush announces he will stage his own funeral before he dies and invites folk to come and tell stories about him. His hope is to set the record straight and somehow find inner peace before his death. When a church minister (Gerald McRaney) refuses to assist him in his ‘live’ funeral, Bush approaches the local undertaker Frank Quinn (Bill Murray) who is swayed to help by the large wad of cash thrown at him. Quinn’s assistant Buddy (Lucas Black) is roped into assisting as well and he provides a strong moral compass for the story, as does another minister Rev Jackson (Bill Cobbs), who helped steer Bush through the lowest point of his life forty years ago.

‘Get Low’s’ strength lies in the fact it combines both subtlety and simplicity, and yet deals with complex characters and a weighty story. The different shades and hues of each character are superbly fleshed out by the powerful acting. Robert Duvall is brilliant as Bush, a man with endless depths and inner slippery crevices. Bill Murray is another class act - his particular gift is in making his somewhat sleazy characters both totally human and immensely likeable. Special mention should also be made of Bill Cobbs, who contrary to the way Hollywood normally portrays preachers, develops a character more akin to Desmond Tutu than Jimmy Swaggert.

While Bush is a fairly anti-religion kind of character, ‘Get Low’ itself is an intrinsically spiritual movie. Bush is not against religion as such, but rather he is anti-love and anything that represents love, because he does not feel worthy of ever experiencing it’s benefits again. Yet, in the process of planning his funeral, Bush is forced to reconnect some old relationships that slowly, but surely, begin to water his parched, old soul. Bush has spent his whole life avoiding people, but to come clean before he ‘get’s low’ (buried) he has to revive his ability to relate, and quite to his surprise he simultaneously awakens aspects of his character he thought long dead and buried. Rooted as it is in themes of guilt, regret and free will, ‘Get Low’ takes its viewers on a journey of redemption and reconciliation that anyone can relate to, and offers a new ‘lens’ through which to view the world that is cleaner and more compassionate.

‘Get Low’ is the kind of movie that should be made more often, but is made even more special by the fact that it isn’t. It is hard to believe that a movie with such bottomless depth is director Aaron Schneider’s first film and I look forward to more from him. Four and a half stars out of five.