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Mondays in the Sun feels stuck in a lull dramatically, but given the story it’s telling and what it seeks to accomplish there isn’t really any way to avoid that. Among Spain’s most decorated films of 2002, the movie is about a small group of tight-knit friends. Each was laid off recently at their port town’s shipyard. The film covers how the next few months, which find the majority of them failing to find new jobs, uncoil. Nothing particularly of note happens until an inevitable tragedy for one of the characters announces itself not so surprisingly for anyone in his life. 

There’s Reina (Enrique Villén), who manages to pick up work as a security guard and tries not to rub in his employment; Amador (Celso Bugallo), who, deeply despairing, plunges into all-consuming alcoholism; Santa (Javier Bardem), who is the most cocksure of the bunch and only finds, at best, an unanticipated babysitting gig; and José (Luis Tosar), who is so frustrated by everything (in part because of his unemployment) that he can’t even get through a loan-application meeting without huffing at the bank employee if he senses approval is a pipe dream. José’s long-suffering wife, Ana (Nieve de Medina), unhappily works at a cannery that gives her skin a fishy smell; she seems in an arrested state of “on her last straw.” One spends a good chunk of Mondays in the Sun wondering if she will at last decide that José has taken a step too far. 

Co-written and directed by Fernando León de Aranoa, the film has a depressing realism; it gets right the deeply unsettling feelings of untetheredness that spring from unemployment. The performances have a muted rumble to them; they effectively suggest people both engulfed and numbed by their low spirits about where their lives are going outside of their regular meet-ups at their favorite local bar. Bardem, who won the Spanish equivalent of an Oscar for his work, is unsurprisingly best of all. His ordinarily taut abs now pooch out into a doughy beer gut; his dense hair is artificially thinned out at the front. This physical transformation grabs your attention; Bardem’s performance gives it substance to attach itself to to make sure the change isn’t purely superficial. With his inherent swagger still intact, Bardem is moving as a man you can tell was once a hotshot — he hasn’t completely lost his confident strut yet — getting steadily absorbed by his sense of purposelessness and uncertainty around where he’ll go next.

Mondays in the Sun contains jewels of affecting poignance. Santa, out of spite, thwacking a streetlight after reluctantly paying for the one he broke while participating in a strike. A tour through Amador’s apartment, which reveals a home life more shattered than he’d been letting on. The friends, momentarily rising to the occasion of a shared jubilee, clambering on stage to finish a karaoke song in pitchy harmony together. But those jewels do not that engaging a movie make. Aranoa is so concerned with keeping everything believable under the crushing thumb of bleak reality that the movie is never much more than its verisimilitudinous authenticity.