Everyday - 2012 - 2 1/2 Stars

Director: Michael Winterbottom
Cast: Shirley Henderson, John Simm, Johnny Lynch

Michael Winterbottom's new film Everyday was commissioned by BBC Channel 4, who wanted Winterbottom to make a story about the prison system. It is the story of a mother of four and her husband who is in prison for reasons we don't know and never discover. It's shot entirely in digital, has a documentary aesethic and I assume is heavily improvised. The film has one large extra-textual conceit, it was filmed over 5 years so the children in the film could age properly throughout shooting. Bad aging makeup and multiple child actors playing the same character is something that irks me, so while I intellectually appreciated Winterbottom's choice and the producers for humouring his obsession, ultimately the payoff for this decision is nothing more than a "hey, that's kind of cool" and it only enriches the films on the margins.

The film itself is a low-key naturalistic British drama about a middle class family and a determined mother struggling to make ends meet. The title Everyday is appropriate because it tends to focus on minor day to day events for a family who's patriarch is temporarily incarcerated . Winterbottom and co-screenwriter Laurence Coriat avoid the melodramatic climaxes one would expect from a movie about a single mother with an imprisoned husband and instead focus on how one accepts and adapts to this major change on a daily basis. As with the children's aging in the film,  I enjoyed Winterbottom's intimate-micro perspective of a family on a cerebral level, but no others. Shirley Henderson gives a great performance as an overworked mother, but the low stakes throughout the movie make everything feel inconsequential; as if we were watching a collection of the well shot and edited home videos. I commend Winterbottom for trying an interesting experiment, I just wish the results were more dynamic.