Everyday

Everyday is a British kitchen sink drama with a twist from the inventive, often experimental director Michael Winterbottom. John Simm plays Ian, a working class guy imprisoned for some kind of medium level offence (maybe theft or drug smuggling, it’s never made clear). Shirley Henderson plays his wife Karen, a bartender left to raise their four children on her own. Employing his naturalistic, almost documentary style, Winterbottom shows us chapters in this couple’s life during the five years of Ian’s sentence. What makes the film unique is that it was shot over an actual five-year period, a few weeks at a time; so that we see the four children (played by real life siblings Shaun, Robert, Katrina, and Stephanie Kirk) grow up before our eyes as time passes. Unfortunately, the film has little more going for it than this production conceit. The movie was released a year prior to Richard Linklater’s Boyhood, which employed a similar approach over a twelve year time span. Unlike Linklater, Winterbottom wants his film to be totally nondramatic and eschews even the most minimal of narrative arcs. However, there is far less poetry in the day-to-day realties of Everyday then in the loose construction of small milestones that comprise Boyhood.

While the performances by Simm and Henderson (both Winterbottom regulars) and the children are authentically naturalistic, engaging, and sympathetic, the repetitive series of jailhouse visitations and home front banalities comes across like distanced, scratch-the-surface voyeurism that attempts to extol the dignity and virtues of the underprivileged-- po’folk porn, if you will--rather then an insightful examination of the feelings and family life of an incarcerated, working class prisoner. Michael Nyman’s monotonous, overbearing score only emphasizes the film’s unvarying completion and actually gets in the way of our ability to connect with either of the main characters. Winterbottom is clearly striving for the social realism of Ken Loach, but he ends up with what I assume Mike Leigh’s movies would be like if Leigh didn’t bother spending months and months developing his stories before rolling his cameras.