If you love character films, "Another Year" is the film for you. Granted, even for a British film, it seemed rather slow for most of the first half but I couldn't stop watching---the characters lured me immediately and persistently.

Lesley Manville plays Mary: a very pretty and exceedingly lonely woman who tries painfully hard to create a life for herself. The depths of her despair but valiant effort to be happy is paralleled by her best friend Gerri, played perfectly by Ruth Sheen. Gerri and Mary have worked together for twenty years. Gerri has always initiated kind and regular invitations to Mary to come to dinner.

Gerri and Tom (played by the brilliant Jim Broadbent) have a mature and loving ease to their marriage of so many years. They are solid realists. Their compassion for their friends and family is equal, their acceptance for a broad range of people in their lives is not only notable but admirable. They have a great heart each and melded together as a couple. Mary has had a tough time of it and it is apparent to the audience that she needs Gerri.

As she and Tom have always invited Mary to dinner for twenty years, Mary has also watched their son grow up---who is now thirty and still single. Mary has a gift for "getting ideas" about things that are not always true. She's a bit naive and therefore foolish---yet generally harmlessly so. Until one night....

Mike Leigh (writer/director) carefully develops---no, allows his characters to evolve---through ordinary, daily living that as each character's desires come more into focus, they also come into conflict with the desires of others. This drives the story to bring these relationships to a troubling climactic point: Mary's loneliness and deluded need to belong is more than awkward when she meets Joe's (played sweetly by Oliver Maltman) serious girlfriend when he surprises his parents by bringing her to dinner one night. While everyone "understands" Mary is quirky, no one foresees how toxic her pain has become. Nor how protective Gerri can be of her family.

Has Mary finally overstepped her bounds? Will Gerri and Tom turn on her afterall? Has she lost her best friend Gerri forever?

Other characters enter the story to fill out these three who are the pivotal characters. The film is tender and haunting. These characters will hold your attention and your heart.

It would seem that popular culture is spinning out of control with hypersensitivity to a frenetic need to be in touch with everyone---fast, furious, superficial hydroplaning relationships. Thank God for Mike Leigh. This film is human, rooted, stable, real in its depiction of how beautiful and calm life can be, and how each of us longs for friends like Gerri and Tom. Some of us even wish we could be them. We still need to slow down, to touch the earth, to touch each other, to linger in the presence of those we love.

It's not a feel-good movie, but it is hopeful and satisfying. The characters are so distinctive and memorable. I hope everyone involved receives the recognition they deserve for this meaningful collaboration.

See the film.