Happy-Go-Lucky

The main thing to say about this film is that it is pretty much a one-woman show. The movie IS Sally Hawkins. If you're as captivated by her performance as I was, then this movie will delight you to no end. If you find her annoying or uninteresting, then chances are the movie won't affect you much at all. But what kind of emotional armor could you be wearing to resist her? She's simply amazing, and she gives as completely lived a performance as I've ever seen in a movie. How did she not get a nomination for best actress at this year's Academy Awards? How did Happy-Go-Lucky not win the award for best original screenplay? (I mean, Milk was very good, but the screenplay was often unruly, and the film's power came mostly from its performances.) I don't know the answer to these questions. I just know I can't wait to see this film again.


HAPPY-GO-LUCKY

The title of this splendid British film (Oscar nominee for Best Original Screenplay) is a bit ironic, because Happy-Go-Lucky is often not a very happy film at all. Although essentially a comedy, it delves into some pretty dark corners of the human soul—sexual frustration, anger, bigotry, child abuse, and madness all make their startling appearances in what is otherwise a buoyant celebration of a unique free spirit and her irrepressibly upbeat approach to living.

Poppy is a 30-year-old kindergarten teacher of boundless enthusiasm, for her students, her friends, and seemingly everyone she meets during the course of her day. As portrayed by the wonderful Sally Hawkins, Poppy is also endearingly eccentric—no saccharine Pollyanna, she’s an outrageous (though innocent) flirt, a bawdy drinking companion, and a deliberate but disarming disturber of the peace for those quiet, serious souls she considers to be in need of a good shaking up. In fact, it is her self-described mission in life to raise people’s spirits, to make them see the possibilities for joy around them, and she carries it to great—and sometimes maddening--lengths.

Happy-Go-Lucky certainly begins happily enough. In an opening credits sequence that nearly bursts from the screen, Poppy rides her bicycle through the streets of London, gaily weaving around traffic as the camera sweeps ahead of her, smiling, laughing, observing, drinking in every moment and sight along the way, and making them all as lovely as she is. The film that follows is essentially an exploration of the energy behind this ride, of the effervescent personality and joyous connection to the world that it represents. At heart it’s a character study: what little plot exists is provided by the daily ups and downs of Poppy’s existence, by the various encounters--some random, some routine—with all those lucky enough to cross her path.

This quality gives it something in common with the Italian Neorealist films of the post-World War II era, films whose artful arrangement of the simple incidents of everyday life often emphasize character over the furtherance of story. In fact, Happy-Go-Lucky might be slyly alluding to that famous film movement in a very specific way: after the exuberant opening, Poppy’s bicycle is stolen while she is browsing in a bookstore (and flirting, unsuccessfully but hilariously, with its owner). In Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves, probably Neorealism’s best-known film, a bicycle stolen near the beginning of the story starts a man on a downward spiral towards tragedy. No such fate awaits Poppy, however--she quickly shrugs off her loss as one of life’s little annoyances, absorbing the incident into her optimistic worldview, something to be regretted but still laughed at and gotten over. The difference in reactions, and the way this film recovers and begins anew in the very next scene, not only marks an important divergence in purpose between the two films, but also suggests that writer-director Mike Leigh (Secrets and Lies) might have inserted the theft as an in-joke for cinema lovers.

Still, Poppy’s life is by no means trouble-free. Several of the film’s episodes describe trials that test her spirit, trials which grow darker as the story progresses. A child in her class is the victim of abuse at home; a tense weekend spent at her married sister’s house uncovers old family wounds; and in the film’s most mysterious and moving sequence, Poppy discovers a disturbed homeless man while walking alone at night, and though his behavior is erratic and potentially a danger to her, she bravely (or foolishly?) tries to befriend him.

And then there’s Scott. Poppy’s penchant for trying to bring out the best in people meets its severest test when she decides to learn to drive (a consequence of the bicycle theft). Her weekly lessons with Scott (Eddie Marsan), a driving instructor with some serious issues, provide the film’s free-flowing story line with its most overt organizing principle. An angry, embittered, bigoted man who resents Poppy’s relentless good cheer, Scott resides at the antipodes of Poppy’s world. They clash over everything, from what she wears to her inability to stop chatting during her lessons--even over her attempts at friendship. And yet slowly, inevitably perhaps, Scott begins to answer her invitation to relate to her as a human being rather than as just another student. In the end, they affect each other in ways neither could foresee, and while the audience might not be completely surprised by the dilemma Scott eventually finds himself in, the explosiveness of his reaction to it is a shock that threatens to rip the delicate fabric of the film apart.

The driving metaphor is brilliant, providing multiple ways to picture the central conflict of Poppy’s life: her struggle not just to enjoy her time on earth but to define it in terms of personal freedom, her own as well as others’. Scott’s dogged determination to remain disengaged is embodied by his profession: keeping one’s eyes on the road, moving straight ahead down predetermined paths is essential to the business of driving. Poppy, of course, is used to the greater freedom of riding a bicycle, and her inability, or unwillingness, to adapt to the more restricted circumstances of an automobile finds expression in her continuous stream of conversation and her continued attempts to notice everything interesting around her. What Scott warns are distractions, Poppy sees as the reasons she’s alive in the first place.

The enclosed space of Scott’s tiny car perfectly depicts this contradiction. Poppy is almost literally trapped, confined by a seat belt and by Scott’s instructions, his attempts to control every movement of her hands, her head, her eyes. Hawkins’ energetic and voluble performance is answered by Marsan’s tight-lipped, glowering turn as Scott in a conflict of personalities that redefines the notion of incompatibility. Despite the fact that they sit in such cramped proximity, they hardly share this space: Leigh depicts them mostly in separate shots, rarely in the two-shots that he employs for Poppy’s encounters with the other people in her life, where entire conversations play out in a single continuous take, using the unbroken frame and real time to capture the ease with which she relates to them.

This tactic is put to especially good use in the scenes devoted to her budding relationship with Tim (Samuel Roukin), a social worker who comes to help the abused boy in her classroom. Poppy’s interest in a man strikes the right chord this time, and the chemistry of their first date leads to what has to be one of the most sweetly erotic love scenes ever filmed. Leigh once again trusts his actors to play the entire scene in a single shot, and the simplicity of the set-up, plus the charm of Poppy’s goofy approach to foreplay, make their transition to lovemaking seem both effortless and real.

It’s a mark of the command Leigh has over his material that he follows this romantic interlude with the fury of the final encounter between Poppy and Scott, and it feels dramatically right. Both terrifying and sad, this final “driving lesson” is about how one navigates through the traffic of other lives, and it leaves the viewer grasping the irony that although Poppy has finally succeeded in breaking down Scott’s reserve, it has made her realize that there are times when she needs to invoke that protection for herself.

Happy or sad, Happy-Go Lucky engages the viewer as completely as it does because of Sally Hawkins’ incredible charm as Poppy. The film marks the harmonic convergence of an amazing actress and a role she seems not so much to perform as to let radiate from her. But more important than its winning portrait of an unforgettable character, Happy-Go-Lucky offers us a reminder of what character is, or can be: the ability, in often unremarkable circumstances, to live one’s life remarkably from within.