fredkontur.com - Diary - Archives - Saturday, November 29, 2008

Today, I went to see the movie Happy-Go-Lucky (reviews here and here). It's a movie directed by Mike Leigh, who is famous for gathering actors together to start work on his movies without any script whatsoever. All he has is an idea about what the story will be. The actors go through weeks of improvisations with no cameras rolling until their characters are fleshed out and a story is developed. Leigh's body of work, the movies that come out of these collaborations, are known for being bleak, depressing stories of everyday Londoners scraping by in their desperate lives. Indeed, Leigh's most famous movie, Naked, is a soul-killingly downer of a tale. Even though a majority of Leigh's movies are bleak enough, it's a bit unfair to say that that's all he does. He made a movie in 2000 about Gilbert and Sullivan, called Topsy-Turvy, that was happy and exuberant. And his last movie, Vera Drake, unseen by me, was not especially dark. Nevertheless, Leigh seems to be known as a maker of depressing movies, and his newest work, the aptly named happy movie Happy-Go-Luckly, is being called a huge departure from his usual style.

A kindergarten teacher named Poppy is the central character in Happy-Go-Lucky. In real life, she may be insufferable. She is one of those people who is never even a little bit down, whose bubbly setting is stuck on max. If she's not joking, giggling, or bouncing, then she's not awake. I said that in real life, she would be insufferable, but it's hard to believe that in a 2-hour movie in which her character is on the screen for nearly every second, her shtick isn't excruciating. But it isn't. She grows on you. And this is a testament to the actress who plays Poppy, Sally Hawkins, who is expected to be nominated for an Oscar for her work in the movie. Happy-Go-Lucky starts off as a light-hearted few-days-in-the-life story of the eternally silly Poppy. It actually could have probably pulled that off for the whole duration. The counterpoint to Poppy's character is Scott, the tightly-wound driving teacher whom Poppy hires after her bike is stolen. Their back-and-forth is delightfully Abbott-and-Costello-like (or Dwight-and-Jim-like, or Cox-and-J.D.-like, pick your favorite comic duo). Poppy knows how to push Scott's buttons, and despite her seemingly kind nature, she can't help doing it. This interaction is the life of the movie most of the way through. After about the halfway point, several "serious" subjects are thrown into the mix, and, indeed, we see an interesting and deeper side to Poppy's character when she has to deal with a student who is coping with a troubled home life. But, ultimately, this is not a serious movie. When it starts to veer too far towards the darkly serious territory, it rings false. I don't think it is impossible that people like Poppy exist, but in the real world, there is a danger to being so innocently optimistic and cheerful. At times, the movie broaches this, but then it backs off. It either had to go all the way into the dark consequences that linger just on the other side of cheerfulness, or pretend that no such things exist, but going halfway was the worst of all choices. These missteps are small parts of the movie (although one of those small parts is right at the end), so it's little more than a distraction.

So trust me, though unceasingly bubbly, happy people may be grating in real life, not so in this movie. So you should give it a try. And you can have fun annoying your friends when you're out driving by repeating "enraha, enraha, ENRAHA!!!!" over and over again. Watch the movie, and you'll get it.

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