'Another Year' review: Mike Leigh's gutsy drama

Yet not all good movies are like vacations where you flop into a chair and people bring you drinks with little umbrellas in them. To some good movies are like vacations where you climb things and drink water out of a canteen and are fairly miserable until you reach the top. But afterward, which is the experience that stands out and that you reflect on with satisfaction?

"Another Year" is a gutsy movie, in that Leigh says something about life that nobody really wants to believe, and he says it forcefully: There is such a thing as "too late." There are certain lives that are hopeless. Leigh depicts characters at the point in life (after 50) when all the bills for all their mistakes are coming due, and he shows how sometimes there's just nothing to be done. Some problems can't be solved. Some emotional pain can't be alleviated, only managed.

The film takes place over the course of a year in the life of a married couple (Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen), who enjoy their work and each other and have entered late middle age with no money worries. But their friends - oh, their friends. Chief among them is Mary, played by Lesley Manville in a performance of such meticulousness and poignancy that it's truly a marvel. It is the great thing in "Another Year" and the reason to see it.

Manville gives us a woman with a real capacity for high spirits, but who is terribly unhappy and trying with all her might to blast out of it. She calls herself a "glass half full" type of person and talks nonstop, but her manner announces her insecurity and low status seconds into every encounter. She has made mistakes in her life - a bad marriage in her 20s, a failed affair with a married man a decade later - and because of these mistakes, so easy to make, she is alone. She lost valuable years on dead ends, and now she's exactly where - and who - she was 20 years ago, only more damaged and more desperate.

With the changing seasons, "Another Year" introduces other old friends of the happy couple, including an obese man (Peter Wight) who comes over and attempts to eat, drink and smoke himself to death in one sitting - and then bursts into tears. The relentlessness of Leigh's pessimism goes to the border of self-parody. (At one point, we meet the girlfriend of the happy couple's son, and of course Leigh casts the gooniest possible actress in the role, because to do otherwise would be to admit that there's hope in life.) But at its best, through seemingly structureless scenes, "Another Year" hammers home an unbending message, that little blunders - financial, personal, professional - are enough to derail a life.

It's to Mary that we and the movie keep returning with sympathy and fascination. It is not easy to watch her, as she embarrasses herself, reveals too much and drinks herself into a stupor. (Manville's drunken scenes are technical perfection.) Her self-hatred, her valiant but futile lunges at happiness and her colossal self-delusion, as when she flirts with a man 20 years her junior, don't inspire scorn but recognition. We've seen this person. Maybe, in our worst moments, we've worried that we've seemed like her, that people have looked into us and saw someone vulnerable and flailing.

"Life isn't always kind, is it?" a woman observes in "Another Year." It's trite to say it, but to illustrate that and make viewers feel it takes an artist. In Leigh's world, the sadness is even sadder for its being undramatic, for being tragic and humdrum, awful and yet so awfully common.

-- Advisory: This film contains substance abuse and adult themes.

E-mail Mick LaSalle at mlasalle@sfchronicle.com.

This article appeared on page E - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle