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Happy Go Lucky

A Life Half Full

Happy people—don’t you just hate them?

Sally Hawkins in Happy-Go-Lucky

Even if you think you don’t, you’re likely to be a bit annoyed at your first meeting with Poppy (Sally Hawkins). Aimlessly wandering through a book store (where she picks up a book called The Road to Reality and comments, “Don’t want to go there!”), she tries to chat with the clerk. He refuses to so much as acknowledge her—can’t she see that he has books to shelve?—which only makes her try all the harder.

When she gives up and leaves, only to find out that her bicycle has been stolen, part of you, not the part you’re proud of but part of you nonetheless, thinks, Hah! That’ll show you! Going around bothering hardworking folk with your incessant happiness!

But Poppy simply quips, “I didn’t even get a chance to say goodbye,” and goes on with her life. Because Happy-Go-Lucky is a Mike Leigh film, and those are nothing if not about how people live their lives.

Leigh has attracted a sizeable cult following in the US for his singular work, most famously the bleak 1993 film Naked and dramas like Vera Drake, All or Nothing, and Secrets and Lies. A devotee of Robert Altman and John Cassavetes, Leigh famously uses extended periods of improvisation in which his cast develops their characters as a basis for the script he then writes. There’s no actual improvisation in the films themselves, though—though they may often seem loosely knit, his scripts are tightly honed by the time the camera starts to roll.

Reviewers have been eager to paint Happy-Go-Lucky as a change of pace for Leigh: “This film made me blissfully happy,” raves a typical blurb, and even the press notes, which you would think would know better, call the movie “an effervescent new comedy.” Anyone who goes to see it expecting something along the lines of the Audrey Tatou film Amelie are likely to be disappointed. But Leigh’s fans, as well as anyone who responds to committed acting and well-fleshed characterizations, will be rewarded with a film that sticks with them for days.

As we follow Poppy though her days, we see that she is defined less by “happiness” than by the optimism with which she chooses to live her life. If she has a precedent in the Leigh canon, it is perhaps a younger version of the the mother played by Alison Steadman in my favorite of his films, Life Is Sweet (1991). Approaching 30, Poppy may seem overly girlish, certainly to her family who chide her to settle down to a husband and a mortgage. She’s not unaware that she won’t be young forever, and besides, from what we see of her family, it’s more a case of misery wanting company.

She teaches primary school, and at first we think, Aha, water finding its own level. But she has a keen eye on her charges, and we see that she understands that there is more to making children happy than simply letting them do what they like. (Like all of Leigh’s films, what a character does for a living is an important part of who they are. Which seems like an obvious thing to say, but how many movies give you anything remotely like a realistic depiction of how ordinary people spend their days? If the late Studs Terkel wasn’t a fan of Leigh’s films, it could only be because he hadn’t seen them.)

Happy-Go-Lucky doesn’t have much of what you could call a plot, but it does have a conflict, between Poppy and Scott (Eddie Marsan), her driving instructor. The latter, who insists on his rigorously thought-out theory of teaching, is absolutely terrible at it. He is a deeply unhappy person, bullying of his students and given to conspiratorial views of the world’s ills. (In a few more years he’s likely to end up like the night watchman in Naked.) His clashes with Poppy are both the funniest parts of the movie and its serious core, culminating in one of the explosive confrontations that Leigh’s films always feature.

That the acting in Happy-Go-Lucky is all top flight goes without saying: Any performer who couldn’t shine under Leigh’s enormously attentive method would probably move on to a different line of work. This is not a movie that will please people who like to feel that they have gone from point A to point B. But, like the best of Leigh’s films, it is a movie that leaves you feeling that you have been somewhere and with someone.



Trailer for Happy Go Lucky


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