Happy-Go-Lucky
Happy-Go-Lucky
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Synopsis

Mike Leigh wrote and directed this uncharacteristically sweet comedy, and it almost unanimously drove critics and juries wild. Or maybe it was the irresistible performance of Sally Hawkins as Poppy, a spirited, cheery elementary schoolteacher who tries to help her students, coworkers, and friends coexist in an otherwise cruel system (a.k.a. North London). With Alexis Zegerman and Eddie Marsan. Hawkins won the Silver Berlin Bear for Best Actress at the 2008 Berlin Film Festival.

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   | Lewis#4

At the center of this film--she’s in nearly every scene--is Poppy, an exceedingly high-spirited nursery school teacher in northern London. As expertly played by Sally Hawkins, Poppy is irrepressible, a smiling, chattering dynamo. No matter what comes her way--a surly bookstore clerk, the theft of her bike, the prickliness of her married sister, back problems--her sunniness remains intact. Indeed she’s almost a bit much, and we fully expect a “comeuppance” at the film’s end--an auto accident, a sexual assault, a disease, a death. There are times in fact when a sense of menace is injected into the proceedings, never more so than when Poppy takes driving lessons with Scott, a humorless, short-tempered malcontent. Scott is played by Eddie Marsan, a brilliant actor who usually finds himself fourth or fifth or fifteenth from the top of the cast list (often in the role of a tough). Here, Marsan’s intensity, terrifying in his final scene, is a wonder to behold. Though we may have felt some sympathy for him in the earlier driving-lesson scenes--Poppy really can be a pain--eventually his bigotry and insecurity come through (engendering perhaps a different kind of sympathy). “Happy-Go-Luck” fits well into the oeuvre of its director, Mike Leigh. Poppy is cut from the same cloth as certain other Leigh creations (in films such as “High Hopes,” “Life is Sweet,” and “Secrets and Lies”) even if she ratchets up the cheerfulness to an unprecedented level. Leigh’s well-known technique of fleshing out characters in cooperation with his actors--the final script grows out of a period of exploratory improvisations--seems always to insure both a solidity of individual characterization and a naturalness in the ensemble work. This film is no exception.

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