It's too easy to overlook Mike Leigh as a major director

I have to believe that if Mike Leigh films were subtitled and set in Belgium or Rumania, he would be much more widely recognized and appreciated as a serious director of major works of art. Couldn't you take three of his works, about people in London and environs, most of them working class, struggling to get on with and make sense of their lives, and call them a trilogy, and wouldn't they be on a par with the work of the Dardennes brothers, for example? Why not Secrets and Lies, Happy-go-Lucky, and his more recent (2010) Another Year - what a great sequences these three would make, each with a recognizable style and look, but each with its own ethos and mood? Another Year is the darkest of the three for sure, but excellent none the less, and, like many great films (e.g., Rules of the Game), it grows on you and builds in power as it moves along: as if Leigh knows everything about his characters and we learn about the gradually, incrementally - and not through highly dramatic action but by observing their everyday lives, sometimes as they discuss trivia, as most people do, and sometimes in moments of high tension and crisis. Another Year, as title suggests, takes us through a year in the lives of a few people: a 60ish professional couple, Gerry and Tom of good sense and a happy marriage, their adult son who's kind and independent and a bit lonely at least at the outset, and Mary, one of Gerry's co-workers, who is attractive and lively but has a serious not-so-secret drinking problem. Mary's gradual decline over the course of the year is the main narrative thread of the film, and makes this film very sorrowful, right down to the final images when she faces a choice in her life and begins to gain some painful self-knowledge. Along the way, there are many scenes that strike me as very true and recognizable, and Leigh's great skill is to let these scenes just play out at a natural pace, with no flashy technique, no dogmatism, no phony heightened emotions or screaming: especially the excellent scenes late in the film of the funeral and wake in a drab working-class suburb, of the very awkward conversation between Mary and Tom's alcohol-ruined older brother. I think nobody is better than Leigh at getting characters to convey meaning from a glance or a gesture - astonishing how much can "happen" around a kitchen table even when the characters are saying little or speaking in banalities. (Renoir was great at this, too.) Leigh chooses to work w/ actors who are anything but glamorous - the complete opposite of the Hollywood ethos - but on the other hand his life's work is a mixture of these serious interior movies and more conventional period biopics, equally good but quite different (Topsy Turvey, the new Mr. Turner, which I haven't seen), all of which make him hard to categorize and, because of that perhaps, too easy to overlook as a major director.