A one-line recap of Mike Leigh’s new film, Another Year, sounds like a thrillist cinephile’s nightmare: two-plus hours that drag through a year in the life of the happiest, most fuzzy-feeling inducing onscreen married couple since, perhaps, Jimmy Stewart met Donna Reed. Yet in a January that is quickly crowding with dreadful, over-the-top shockers — The Mechanic, The Rite, The Eagle, etc. — Leigh’s little love vignette stands out as a singular breath of emotional sanity, a beautiful exaltation of everyman heroics, with the psychological intelligence of an Arthur Miller play.

The movie centers on Tom (Jim Broadbent) and Gerri (Ruth Sheen), a couple of jolly empty-nesters who spend their menopausal transition indulging in life’s simple, soul-buffeting pleasures. It’s an almost Hobbit-like existence — tending the community garden, cooking arrabiata, taking an extra glass of wine during a Wednesday evening dinner. When we first meet the couple, their married life is so abundant and ideal that we wonder if they are being set up in counterpoint to some cynical takedown. There is no cynicism in Leigh’s vision of the world, just a gentle affection for regular people — all their joys and foibles — that places the director in a camp with fellow British filmmaker Terence Davies.

The foibles in Another Year are largely provided by the nervous, neurotic mess, Mary (Lesley Manville), a secretary from Gerri’s medical office (she is a therapist) who is a longtime friend of the family. We gradually pick up on events from Mary’s past that paint the picture of a once-beautiful, carefree girl who spent her productive years cocktail waitressing in beautiful locales — Majorca, the Greek Islands. She married early, divorced before she was 30, and fell in love with the man of her dreams, only he was already married.

On the early-cusp of middle-age, Mary is unraveling. She is lonely, sad, distracted by her loneliness, and desperate. The movie is divided into four parts, one for each season, and in the first, spring, Gerri and Tom invite Mary over for dinner. Mary downs glass after glass of white wine until she breaks down on the living room couch, pleading for Gerri to share herself with her. It is a terrible, saddening sight: the lovely woman desperately hungry for an emotional connection, a co-dependent conversation. Mary tries to make a family out of Gerry and Tom, and she manages to delude herself for much of the movie, making her eventual realization that their bond of friendship is less dear than that of real family all the more devastating.

The rock-steady, benevolent Tom and Gerri are like magnets for these wandering souls. In summer, Tom’s childhood friend Ken (Peter Wight) arrives for a stay. A bachelor still living in his hometown, watching his friends and relatives move away or die one-by-one, Ken seems to be trying to smoke, drink, and eat his loneliness away. In one of Another Year’s most touching moments, Tom and Ken sit on a swing set in the couple’s backyard. Tom tries to invite Ken on a walking holiday in the autumn that would see the friends spending their days walking the countryside and their evenings at the pubs they would lodge at along the way. I was dying for Tom to extend the invitation to me, but Ken won’t accept. “What are we going to do with you then, eh?” Tom asks into the night air. As Ken sits silent, we bare the difficult truth: nothing. Ken is a man whose sad life has passed the point of turning back. If only Mary would care for him, but Ken is too physically unappealing for Mary to even entertain the idea.

Not all these little moments are melancholic; there is a great deal of comedy, love and warmth in Another Year. And life isn’t hopeless for everyone but Tom and Gerri. The couple’s son, Joe (Oliver Maltman), a goofy, nerdish boy who shares his parents’ jocular, gentle nature, manages to find a wonderful partner in Katie (Karina Fernandez). But these unspectacular moments allow Leigh to take the clay of the everyday and mold into a drama of great personal struggle and courage. Tom and Gerri are not an ideal, a type, or a dream — Leigh’s too good a storyteller to let his characters become anything less or more than human. They are — gasp! — simple, good people deeply engaged in the struggles and pleasures of regular life. Here is life, Leigh seems to say, it is both less extraordinary and more amazing than anything you are used to seeing at the movies.

Images courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics.