Who are intelligent and alert to the real world? Not caricatures, not comforting, not cliches, but simply two people I wish I knew? I'd look forward to them every time I visited their house and be slow to leave. She has worked for years in the office of Gerri, a behavioral counselor. Many people have a friend like Mary: unmarried, not getting any younger, drinking too much, looking for the perfect spouse as a way of holding any real-world relationship at arm's length.
Every time she visits, we're reminded of Robert Frost : Home is where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in. Mary needs healing. She badly requires sobriety. She wears an invisible sign around her neck: Needy. Tom and Gerri don't lecture. Sometimes they drop gentle hints. No criticisms, no anger, just a factual statement. In their own lives, they're in complete accord.
They garden, they work, they feed their friends dinners, they hope their son will find the right girl, they are in love. Remarkably, in this age, their year-old son, Joe Oliver Maltman , loves them and is happy.
Leigh has a gift for scenes involving embarrassment in social situations. We squirm, not because the characters are uneasy, but because we would be, too.
Tom and Gerri and their son attend the funeral of Tom's sister-in-law. We have never been to a funeral quite like it, yet it is like many funerals. The uninvolved clergyman, the efficient undertakers, the remote father, the angry son, the handful of neighbors who didn't know the deceased all that well, the family skeletons.
Leigh sees the ways people display their anguish without meaning to. The movie doesn't require this scene. It has no obligatory scenes.
Tom is a geologist and land surveyor, and Gerri is a counsellor; Imelda Staunton appears in a tantalisingly brief cameo as a patient suffering from insomnia and depression.
They have a grownup son, Joe Oliver Maltman , who has evidently inherited his dad's breezy, sarky, unreflective sense of humour, and whose still-unmarried condition concerns the parents not one whit. Despite or perhaps because of their contentment, Tom and Gerri's home has become a magnet for lost and damaged souls. Tom's old mate Ken Peter Wight is an overweight boozer with unresolved issues, and then there is Mary, played by Lesley Manville , a secretary in the GP's office where Gerri works.
Mary is the character who kicks the narrative mechanism into gear. She is a lonely divorcee, superficially sparky and cheerful, but parasitically dependent on her friends, and putting a tragically unconvincing brave face on the awful way her personal life is turning out.
The hysteric quiver in Mary's needy, wheedling laughter has a cry-for-help timbre, disturbing because at some level Mary needs someone to see through her pantomime. The neurotic music of Manville's delivery creates a plaintive, tragic dissonance with the film's actual musical soundtrack, a thoughtful melody with oboe and classical guitar featured prominently. As the movie proceeds, the intensity of her affection for Gerri and Tom's family — she has known them for decades — takes the drama in an increasingly painful direction, and yet the film's note of anxiety remains muffled and subsurface until the drama is blindsided by the explicit, violent anger of a sequence late in the narrative: a funeral in Tom's Lancashire hometown.
This superbly moving section is managed and developed with masterly assurance. Its stab of rage is shocking and yet almost a cathartic relief, and an indication of the limits of niceness. Trivia To simulate the four seasons of a year, cinematographer Dick Pope used four different film stocks, and much attention was paid to details in the props so that the passage of time would appear believable. Goofs One of Mary's outlays on her troublesome car was for a new carburettor, but the vehicle in the film had fuel injection.
Quotes Mary : I'm very much a glass-half-full kind of girl. User reviews Review. Top review. Four Seasons and a Funeral. A strange and sad little film beautifully acted by its ensemble cast. After a sad Spring and a prickly Summer, Autumn brings romance to Tom and Gerri's bachelor son and Winter brings a funeral not the one we've been dreading. Anchored by the couple's devotion to their allotment, Mike Leigh gives us a film about the seasons in our lives as well as in our vegetable patches.
In life, as in the garden, some things flourish and blossom while others wither and decay. Often humorous but mostly achingly sad, this is a very fine film about the Ordinary Lives of Ordinary People.
Not to be missed. Details Edit. Release date February 4, United States. United Kingdom United States. Official site Official site. Untitled Mike Leigh Project. Derby, Derbyshire, England, UK. Box office Edit. Technical specs Edit. Runtime 2 hours 9 minutes. Dolby Digital. Related news. Mar 2 Filmmaker Magazine-Director Interviews. Contribute to this page Suggest an edit or add missing content.
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