‘Another Year’ chronicles misery of single older woman

Brit director Mike Leigh's naturalistic slice-of-life style has its merits, but if it's your life he's slicing, watch out.

Take Leigh's latest, "Another Year." If you're a 40-something woman, never married and not happy about it, reminded every day that you're a bruised McIntosh in a bin full of shiny Honeycrisps, I wouldn't come within a hundred miles of this movie.

Remember that mythical stat about a 40-year-old woman having a better chance of getting killed by a terrorist than getting married? "Another Year" is its cinematic expression.

Actress Lesley Manville gets the short straw as Mary, whose chronic loneliness and problem drinking have made her a burden to her friends, Gerri and Tom (Ruth Sheen, Jim Broadbent), a cozily happy married couple who spend their days tending to their garden, friends and family.

Leigh is known as a performance-centered director, but he's careful about how he's constructed this movie (he's just earned an Oscar screenplay nomination), and this one is arranged around the idea of cultivation.

He divides "Another Year" into four seasons, and as Gerri and Tom plant and reap and prune in their public garden, they also care for the troubled Mary, their directionless single son Joe (Oliver Maltman), and miserable, divorced friend Ken (Peter Wright).

What follows is a bleak, fitfully funny study of crossed motivations. The delusional Mary has her eyes on much younger Joe, and is horrified to realize that Gerri and Tom want to set her up with boozy, unhappy Ken, horrified because she sees so much of herself in Ken. All comes to an ugly head at a drunken cookout that plays to Leigh's ensemble strengths.

The emotions register as authentic - the movie is very workshopped and actorly, and Leigh nails some good moments to the screen.

"Another Year" has also been received by some viewers and critics as a little cruel, and there certainly is a pitiless feeling to it. Life, of course, can be pitiless, and Leigh's method (exhaustive, collaborative rehearsals) certainly captures this with conviction.

Still, you can feel some sort of invisible hand pushing poor Mary rather insistently in the direction of misery, and while Gerri and Tom are meant to be patient and compassionate, they come off as slightly smug and grating, especially as this slow-going movie strolls past the two-hour mark.