[DVD Review (R2)] HAPPY-GO-LUCKY

I once dated a girl just like Poppy, the character portrayed wonderfully by Sally Hawkins in Mike Leigh’s latest Happy-Go-Lucky. In fact, she was probably worse and the very thing that made me fall in love with her was the very same reason I eventually, hypocritically, ended up finishing the relationship. She was just so “on” all the time. So positive and so cheery in every goddamn situation that sometimes it would just infuriate the hell out of me. Sometimes you just want to have a whinge about the increase of your gas bill or whine about wasting money on a bad cinema trip. But this girl saw “gold” in everything. Every film she saw was “brilliant”, everyone she met was “fantastic” and shit never stank in her opinion. It got very weary after a while.

That is what I thought I’d find with Happy-Go-Lucky. I thought I’d find it annoying and frustrating to spend two hours in the company of a character who, in real life, I’d fled from many years ago.

Happy-Go-Lucky will not be for everyone. Not many Mike Leigh movies are. The character will prove exhausting and infuriating to many a viewer because she is front and centre, and in every scene, for two hours and she is so relentless in her outlook that she’ll potentially prove “unwatchable” for many. On top of that, this is another Mike Leigh movie where, in essence, nothing actually happens. There’s no third act revelations, no about-turns for the character or anything like that. It’s two hours bouncing along in the day to day life of one person.

I eventually came to like Happy-Go-Lucky a lot. My opinion fluctuated greatly throughout but it most definitely captured my heart by the movie’s end.

Modern life is not rubbish for Poppy (Hawkins), a 30-year-old primary school teacher wanting to teach the world to embrace the happiness that can be found in day-to-day life, through relentless optimism. Sharing a flat with her best mate Zoe (Alexis Zegerman), Poppy is living life on her own terms. When her bike is stolen, it provides an opportunity to take driving lessons and see the good in more people - even her angry, neurotic instructor Scott (Marsan), and the infant bully in her class.

I’ve never really understood the kudos leveled on Mike Leigh with every release he puts out. Yeah, he’s made some cracking masterpieces and some relatively great fare but he’s also made some very turgid and irrelevant films that just feel like Mike Leigh “doing Mike Leigh” for the sake of making a movie, not because he has something he wants to say. He’s uneven at best, in my opinion. Happy-Go-Lucky though is Mike Leigh doing everything that he does well – a naturalistic movie almost documentary-like in its form of story-telling; a film interested only in character and not story.

Sally Hawkins is fresh, funny and touching in her role as the irrepressible Poppy. Initially, and for a good fifteen to thirty minutes, I found her deeply annoying. I have thrown the “ex-girlfriend” out there as an example to many people who have seen this film and said that the character is an “exaggerated form”. She’s not. I should know. But Poppy, the character, and her outlook, grow on you. And because she is central to the film – in fact she is the film - Happy-Go-Lucky grows on you in tandem with your affection for the character.

There’s actually a moment in the latter part of the film’s second act involving the character and a tramp where we start to question Poppy. Is she almost “simple”? How ‘naive’ is ’too naive’ before it becomes imbecilic? Which modern woman would walk into the dark, dreary dangers that Poppy does in this scene and then actively engage with the tramp the way she does? We understand that she is kind and selfless as a person? But this behaviour? It’s asking for trouble. The naiviety on display is staggering and it pays off wonderfully in the final scene between Poppy and Scott.

Leigh’s masterstroke, counterbalancing the lack of conventional story developments, is to present us with the ‘dark’ to Poppy’s ‘light’ in the form of Eddie Marsan’s Scott, the hate-filled borderline psychotic driving instructor who comes into Poppy’s life when she decides to learn to drive after having her beloved bicycle stolen. Marsan is an over-looked actor, often found doing sublime character work in ‘big’ movies, but he’s one of our best homegrown talents and he delivers an absolutely majestic supporting turn in Happy-Go-Lucky. (Mainstream audiences will probably know him, most recently, as - inexplicably - Kenneth ‘Red’ Parker Jr. in the almost turgid Hancock) The finale third of the movie involving an eventual face-off between his character and Poppy is uncomfortable, darkly humorous, involving and fantastically captured.

Leigh is not a “showy” director. There’s never any visual footprint on any of his movies, per se, and this is no different. But he has an integrity to making sure that it is the characters that get your attention and keep your attention throughout and his direction appears, brilliantly, to only exist to serve them and not us, the viewer.

The film is every so slightly over-long and there’s little vignettes here and there that, in afterthought, slow the movie down a little and don’t really belong in the overall piece. However, when you consider that Happy-Go-Lucky is nothing more than just under two hours in the company of a character that bounces from annoying to infectious to irritating to loveable on a consistent basis, that it turns out to be such a joy to watch is probably the most wonderfully surprising thing of all.