Happy-Go-Lucky
Rated M
Running time: 1 hour 58 minutes
Poppy always looks on the bright side of life...
Credits
Written and directed by Mike Leigh;
director of photography, Dick Pope;
edited by Jim Clark;
music by Gary Yershon;
production designer, Mike Tildesley;
produced by Simon Channing Williams;
released by Miramax Films
Cast
Sally Hawkins ... Poppy
Elliot Cowan ... Bookseller
Alexis Zegerman ... Zoe
Andrea Riseborough ... Dawn
Sinead Matthews ... Alice
Kate O'Flynn ... Suzy
Sarah Niles ... Tash
Eddie Marsan ... Scott
Joseph Kloska ... Suzy's Boyfriend
Sylvestra Le Touzel ... Heather
Anna Reynolds ... Receptionist
Nonso Anozie ... Ezra
Trevor Cooper ... Patient
Karina Fernandez ... Flamenco Teacher
Philip Arditti ... Flamenco Student
WHAT THE CRITICS ARE SAYING
Movie review: Dave Calhoun Time Out London
Sally Hawkins is a real delight in Mike Leigh's new film as Poppy, a 30-year-old Londoner with a bubbly nature and an ever-present laugh that teeters between lovable and annoying. Hawkins' performance, and Leigh's harnessing of it, is a tease: when we first see Poppy, cycling through the West End and joking with a grumpy bookshop assistant before joining her friends for a late-night drunken session, we don't know what to make of her. She's loud, joyful and indulges in terrible jokes; surely there's something wrong with her?
The trick that Leigh and Hawkins finally pull off so cleverly by the end of 'Happy-Go-Lucky' is that we're entirely in cahoots with her. Poppy is a mirror to us all: if we find her blind optimism and sunny nature hard to swallow, perhaps there's something wrong with us instead? By then, too, we know that Poppy is not the blinkered soul we may first think: she is compassionate, perceptive and harbours her own sadnesses like the rest of us.
Leigh always finds plot in character, and 'Happy-Go-Lucky' is more of a portrait than a story; a film that's built around one performance. He is less concerned here, unlike, say, 'Secrets & Lies' and 'Vera Drake', with following a driving narrative than with minutely observing Poppy through her relationships with others, whether it's the kids she teaches at her primary school, her repressed driving instructor (Eddie Marsan, excellently playing a heavy-duty bag of hang-ups), her close friend and flatmate Zoe (Alexis Zegerman) or her older, more settled colleague Heather (Sylvestra Le Touzel), whom she joins at flamenco lessons after work. In that sense, it's comparable to 'Naked'.
It's a study in sadness versus happiness, a study in teachers and the taught, a study in how we carry with us everyday the burdens of what we have and haven't learned. You know you're watching something both delightfully light-footed and acutely meaningful when Leigh moves so nimbly between scenes at Poppy's school, her flamenco class and her driving lessons. There's also a wonderfully moving scene, darker and more poetic in tone, when Poppy encounters a tramp late at night. It's a funny film - a surprise perhaps after 'Vera Drake' - and, crucially, it aches with truth.
Time Out London Issue 1965: April 17 - 23, 2008
........................................................................
Review by Margaret Pomeranz"At the Movies", ABC
(Margaret: four stars David: three stars)
The opening night film of the recent Sydney Film Festival was Mike Leigh's Happy-Go-Lucky.
It's about Poppy, (SALLY HAWKINS), a thirty year old London teacher who never lets the world get to her.
When her bike is stolen she regrets not being able to say goodbye but decides to take up the driving lessons she's been putting off for ages.
Not even the obviously uptight driving instructor Scott, (EDDIE MARSAN), can dim her enthusiasm.
The film meanders through Poppy's life, into the flat she shares with fellow teacher and best friend Zoe, (ALEXIS ZEGERMAN), into the classroom where she becomes concerned about the behaviour of one of her children, into the relationship with social worker Tim, (SAMUEL ROUKIN), into trampoline bouncing and flaminco lessons and into the family on a visit with her sisters.
This is Mike Leigh's most embraceable film in years. Poppy is a wonderful creation thanks to the performance by SALLY HAWKINS who manages to transcend Poppy's potentially irritating bubbliness.
And EDDIE MARSAN is explosively good as Scott. I've sometimes found Mike Leigh quite condescending towards some of his characters, but that element is completely missing here.
If there is some slight qualm about the film it is that storylines are hinted at but not followed through, leaving you a bit bemused.
But what is whole is Poppy herself, she is not a superficial creature at all and I'm really glad I got to know her.
Further comments
MARGARET: David?
DAVID: Look, I think the world will be divided between those who like Poppy and those who detest her.
MARGARET: Oh, no!
DAVID: Well, I think it will, because I think she's an extremely annoying character.
MARGARET: Oh!
DAVID: And I've often thought, with Mike Lee, that he's prone to allow his actors to turn their characters into caricatures and, I mean, that's what Brenda Blethyn did for me in SECRETS AND LIES.
I know not everybody agrees with this. And I think that's what Sally Hawkins does here. I really think she turns Poppy into not only a caricature, but a very annoying caricature. She's so cheerful.
MARGARET: Oh, David! That is just so off, you know, because that's how she presents at the beginning and you think, God, am I going to be able to stand this character, who finds the world so...
DAVID: That's what I thought.
MARGARET: You know, she's so optimistic about everything, and nice. But she actually works through that and you get to know the layers of her through the film so that...
DAVID: Look, I think towards...
MARGARET: That's what I mean, you know, she ends up a whole creature.
DAVID: I think towards the end...
MARGARET: You must hate people who are irreparably happy.
DAVID: Only in the irritating caricatured way this is. But I think the performance settles down towards the end and some of the supporting performances.
Eddie Marsan, for example, Alexis Zegerman, I think, are very good and I think there's some really interesting things the film has to say about contemporary London. It's just that I think he lets Sally Hawkins overdo it and it's a common fault with Mike Lee films.
MARGARET: Well, I agree with you about Brenda Blethyn in SECRETS AND LIES but I don't agree with you about Sally Hawkins in this.
DAVID: Well, we'll agree to differ then.
MARGARET: I think, you know, I embrace this film, as I said.
............................................................
The Upside of Seeing the Bright Side
New York Times Friday, February 20, 2009Review by MANOHLA DARGIS
Published: October 10, 2008
If you know the British filmmaker Mike Leigh's work - early and later titles like "Bleak Moments," "Naked" and "Vera Drake" - you may find yourself watching his most recent movie, "Happy-Go-Lucky," with mounting unease, a tinge of dread. Despite the extraordinary human parade that has passed in front of his lens, laughing and raging, yearning for love and asking for cuddles, Mr. Leigh has never been an artist for whom happy (word or idea) has been an easy fit. Life is sweet, as the title of another of his films puts it with a heart-swelling yes, but it's also an eternal fight against doom and gloom, the soul-crushing no.
The push and pull between yes and no animates all of his work, investing it with narrative tension and a sense of artistic purpose that is, whether overtly articulated or not, also insistently, vigorously left-leaning. The hard-working and often besieged characters who populate his stories live in worlds partly defined, if not wholly circumscribed, by ideology and the state. Nobody mounts a soapbox or whistles "The Internationale" in "Happy-Go-Lucky," but the film is so closely tuned to the pulse of communal life, to the rhythms of how people work, play and struggle together, it captures the larger picture along with the smaller. Like Poppy, the bright focus of this expansive, moving film, Mr. Leigh isn't one to go it alone.
Played by a glorious Sally Hawkins - a gurgling, burbling stream of gasps, giggles and words - Poppy rides into "Happy-Go-Lucky" on a bicycle, with daytime London and the film's opening credits slipping past her. She looks lost in thought (not lost) and wonderfully content. The bike soon goes missing ("We didn't even get a chance to say goodbye," she murmurs), but Poppy keeps moving forward and dancing and jumping and laughing and nodding her dark, delicate head as if she were agreeing not just with this or that friend but also with life itself. She's altogether charming or perhaps maddening - much depends on whether you wear rose-colored specs - recognizably human and every inch a calculated work of art.
Mr. Leigh's characters look as if they live in the world rather than in a movie, but are actually painstakingly conceived through an involved and lengthy collaboration between him and his actors that begins with improvisatory rehearsals and results in a tightly structured shooting script. Poppy, short for Pauline, a pixieish 30-year-old partial to bright blues (as if she were dressing with pieces of sky), is one of his most persuasive optimists, though Mr. Leigh tries to obscure her appeal with some early misdirection. Not long after her bike ride, Poppy and some girlfriends materialize at an ear-piercingly noisy club, bouncing in unison to the numbing sonic throb, only to then dissolve together into a silly, girly puddle.
Before you can start huffing superiority, Poppy and her roommate, Zoe (Alexis Zegerman, tastily tart to Poppy's sugar), are joking about Stravinsky and "The Rite of Spring," a bit of high-cultural name-dropping that feels as if it had been specifically designed to tweak the audience's class assumptions. Mr. Leigh has a documentarian's eye for unadorned reality - his people and places look equally lived in - and his dialogue has the ebb and flow, the swells and eddies and logjams of ordinary conversation. His characters often talk in circles instead of direct lines, clucking and offering cups of tea. But the dramatist in Mr. Leigh is always hard at work, aligning his characters for maximum narrative effect and emotional pow.
That's true even if "Happy-Go-Lucky" seems as lighthearted as the bobbing bloom at its center. In some ways, the film feels like a coda to Mr. Leigh's splenetic 1993 drama "Naked," about an angry young man, Johnny, with a severe case of logorrhea. Words are weapons for Johnny, who uses them to prop himself up and tear everyone else down, while for Poppy, a primary-school teacher, they're more of a caress. They're also invariably outwardly directed ("Bless 'em," she says with believable habit) and often accompanied by and obscured by hiccups of laughs and giggles. These yelps of joy at first make her seem a touch demented (a bookstore clerk's silence suggests as much), a prejudice Mr. Leigh is delighted to demolish.
Movies sometimes seem made for misery, for rivers of tears, stormy skies and third-act woe. Happiness is for suckers and Disney Inc. But happiness is a complicated, difficult matter, and in "Happy-Go-Lucky" it's also a question of faith. Poppy isn't a celluloid saint: she lusts like a real woman and nurses plenty of pints to go along with her loneliness. She also betrays herself and her neediness in a series of amazingly paced and played scenes that find her taking weekly driving lessons from Scott (Eddie Marsan, in a boldly repellent turn), a seething lump of rage and resentment whom she soon sends hurtling around the bend. Horribly funny and often just horrible, the lessons distill individual relationships to their stop-and-go lurching essence.
Nothing and everything happens in "Happy-Go-Lucky": Poppy chatters and wanders, teaches and learns. At one point, she takes flamenco lessons (from a sternly funny Karina Fernandez), doing her best to hold a pose that the instructor likens to that of an eagle. But grand poses don't come naturally to Poppy, who, earlier in the story, dresses up like a chicken to the delight of her students. She's made of humbler stuff, human stuff, which Mr. Leigh tenderly expresses in a surrealistic interlude that finds her wandering through a garden and arriving at a kind of Joycean nightscape where a visibly disturbed, gibbering homeless man (Stanley Townsend) asks her again and again, "Know what I mean?" "Yeah," says Poppy, reaching across the abyss. "I do."
...............................................
