Drama v Reality

I watched Michael Winterbottom's new film Everyday on Channel 4 last week. It's been described as a sketched drama, which is a difficult term because although I think it means that it was largely improvised, it could also imply that it wasn't fully realised. Hmm.

The film's USP is that it was made over a period of five years. It explores the relationship between Ian (John Simm), who has been sent to prison for drug smuggling, and his struggling family headed by his wife, Karen (played by the luminous, resilient Shirley Henderson).

Winterbottom's genius lay in finding  four real siblings to play the kids and he filmed them every six months, an arrangement that allowed this understated film to explore whether love can survive a long period of separation and whether it is possible to keep the detail of family life going in such testing circumstances.

The film was beautifully performed and the photography was outstanding – those huge, expressionistic East Anglian skies - but in spite of the fact that the production took so long to complete, the end result was weirdly static.

As a writer, this gave me plenty of food for thought. Over the five years that it took to film, given that the circumstances the characters were facing were so challenging, one would have expected to see profound changes taking place as the tectonic plates of family life shifted, but this wasn't the case. The children grew older, the mum seemed more worn, the dad couldn't resist smuggling some dope back into the prison after some home leave – the crime that landed him inside in the first place. Plus ca change - the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Everyday worked best as a meditation on human behaviour. It was reflective, mirroring the lives of people under stress. I'm not sure it worked as drama. For that you need crisis, change, a journey to self-knowledge, none of which were much in evidence. Drama distils human actions so the audience can experience catharsis, but I'm not sure that realism has these magical powers.