
Driving on the wrong side of the road is so much fun.
By Armond White
“It’s not easy being you, is it?” Mike Leigh’s heroine, Poppy (Sally Hawkins), asks of her angry driving instructor in Happy-Go-Lucky. It’s a quick, friendly jab but also a key insight into Poppy’s own personality; she is the greatest single character in a Mike Leigh film since Johnny, the well-read misogynistic punk in Naked . Poppy is an unmarried 30-year-old elementary school teacher in London who goes through life casting a grin at every adversity. The situations she gets into reflect our political moment, but Poppy’s gleeful response makes her a figure for the ages.
Poppy’s inquiry into her driving instructor’s constant vexation signals what’s unique about her own joie de vivre: She works at it. Like most of Leigh’s subjects, Polly inhabits a social context where people betray the influence of class, economics and cultural tradition.
The peculiarities of Leigh’s characters demonstrate how ruthlessly close and almost analytical his (and his collaborators/actors’) view of human behavior is. Poppy’s insistent happiness might appear lunatic, but to think so would be snobby, if not downright callous. That’s because Happy-Go-Lucky offers a transcendently humanist portrait. Looking at Poppy work with unruly children, drink with her co-workers, cope with her bickering sisters and conduct herself with uncanny simpatico toward roommate Zoe (Alexis Zegerman) reveals a life of spontaneous moral choices.
Forced by (bad) luck to become a motorist, Poppy takes driving lessons from Scott (Eddie Marsan), a pent-up Londoner offended by her carefree air, sexy boots and lace panty hose. Polly and Scott’s mutual combat (he’s irritated, she’s tickled) focuses Leigh’s strategy of testing Poppy’s optimism. While observing occupational behavior, personal obsessions come out in private, often neurotic language. Poppy encounters several styles of coping and not-coping, but with Scott she confronts tragedy. Like Naked’s Johnny, Scott isn’t necessarily wrong about society’s chaos, but he’s twisted into irrational hatred—bile rots his teeth. More than Poppy’s opposite, Scott is the disappointment she defies. He calls her “arrogant, destructive. You celebrate chaos.” Their duels illustrate the difficulty of managing a day in our fractious world.
This contrast provides Happy-Go-Lucky’s triumph. Leigh has never before answered the pessimism of social critique; he just expertly scrutinized its truths. But Poppy’s optimism brings a richer, almost spiritual, quality to his vision. Leigh’s previous schematic plot structures justified themselves by verging into dour realism; now there’s vivacity. His counterpoint face-offs don’t tell us what to think, but what to feel.
As always, the quality of performance Leigh solicits is amazing. Hawkins’ angled, cheery face recalls Geraldine Chaplin’s, and she masters several expressive gestures simultaneously. Her performance reaches deeply, buoyantly, into private idiosyncrasy. Comedy comes from making the mundane poignant. Poppy’s fast patter reveals her inner thoughts. A nervous wit, she has a head full of double entendres and speaks in odd, unexpected, tangential locutions. Nothing she says is ever self-deprecating or campy; she’s always shockingly sincere. Yet her optimism is the opposite of Scott’s sad fury.
It is a rare blessing to have movies such as Happy-Go-Lucky and Rachel Getting Married arrive back-to-back. These films suggest that life goes beyond partisan politics and that politics is what happens moment to moment, day by day. Both are authentically social visions, and they’re sure to rank as the best films this year.
Written and directed by Mike Leigh
With Sally Hawkins, Eddie Marsan, Alexis Zegerman and Samuel Roukin
UA DeVargas
118 min., R