Because it’s an enjoyable way to make a living — and because
freelance film criticism can’t quite pay the bills — I teach high
school. So while I was watching Mike Leigh’s new film,
Happy-Go-Lucky, about 30-year-old primary-school teacher Pauline
“Poppy” Cross (Sally Hawkins) and her life’s little ups and downs, I
kept thinking about a girl in one of my classes. Although I like her a
great deal, I’ll bet she’s a huge nuisance to insecure, bitter,
draconian instructors. For one thing, she likes to talk; once she
talked 35 times during a 65-minute class period. Seventy percent of the
time, she offered relevant commentary; the other 30 percent, she said
more or less whatever was on her mind: a joke, a personal anecdote, a
story that stressed her irrational fear of “John McCain’s short arms.”
But she always brings great intelligence, wit, curiosity, and energy to
my classroom, and I try never to say or do anything to dampen her
joyful spirits. She’ll need them to face the “real world” soon
enough.
Well, what if my student could resist adult despair and maintain her
high hopes? What might her life be like? What might life in general be
like? Through his look at Poppy and her friends, Mike Leigh’s film
provides some answers. In doing so, he has made the year’s best
film.
Happy-Go-Lucky is organized as a series of informal
assessments that test Poppy’s cheery, fully engaged approach to life.
The possibility of a potentially explosive clash of worldviews is most
explicit in the scenes between Poppy and Scott (a superb Eddie Marsan),
her terse, alienated driving instructor. Poppy and Scott’s encounters
are funny and fraught with peril because the contrasts in their
characters are almost too great: Scott is an unsmiling authoritarian
with a head full of apocalyptic incunabula, while Poppy’s absurdist
viewpoint is expressed through constant wordplay and unconscious
flirtation. But the film isn’t all conflict and clash. Her flat-mate
Zoe (Alexis Zegerman, perfect) deals with Poppy best by indulging her
eccentricities and providing some emotional grounding.
Leigh’s approach to filmmaking is as radical as his film’s treatment
of human happiness. Happy-Go-Lucky’s numerous pleasures come
from a nuanced, character-driven realist aesthetic that ignores
goal-oriented plots and story arcs. Partially due to his intensely
collaborative working methods, most of his films ultimately focus on
characters trying to co-exist. As Ray Carney and Leonard Quart say in
their book Embracing the World, “Leigh’s figures are placed in
situations in which their ways of feeling and thinking are compared.
… You see, feel, and understand life in one way; I see, feel, and
understand it in another.”
Thus, several scenes work on multiple emotional levels. The scene
between Poppy, social worker Tim (Samuel Roukin), and a sullen little
bully is a marvel of text and subtext. It’s tender because of the
respectful and cautious way the adults draw information from the kid,
but it’s also incongruently romantic because of the way Poppy and Tim
look at each other over the kid’s bowed head. There are other
precious moments in Happy-Go-Lucky, too; the sad tilt of Poppy’s
head as she sighs “Scott” near the end of the film; the closing of a
yellow door as Poppy and Tim kiss; the scene on the lake as Poppy and
Zoe sit in a rowboat and wonder when they will reach adulthood,
punctuated nicely by Zoe’s deadpan, “Are we there yet?” As the camera
cranes up and back, the broad and generous scope of this little film is
discreetly revealed. The result is breathtaking.
Happy-Go-Lucky
Opening Friday, November 21st
Ridgeway Four