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It's rare these days to see a film that deliberately rejects edginess and irony, but that's what British director Mike Leigh seems to have wanted—and accomplished—in Happy-Go-Lucky, recently released on DVD.
As a Londoner and admirer of Leigh's earlier films, I wanted to love his latest one but ended up with mixed feelings about his main character, Poppy, a 30-year-old teacher, played by the talented Sally Hawkins.
What's not to like about Poppy? She's charming, whimsical, almost relentlessly chirpy. To her, the glass is always half-full. She laughs at everything and everyone, including herself. She doesn't take much seriously—except, we learn, her freedom. And that, along with her carefree attitude, is what irks several other characters in the film.
Fans of Mike Leigh's earlier work, including High Hopes, Vera Drake, and Secrets & Lies, will know that in his universe there's always a dark cloud looming even on the sunniest of horizons. Indeed, part of his reputation in England, a country cheerfully obsessed with irony, comes from ribbing—even skewering—his characters' pretensions, including about joy and happiness. They are less sophisticated or savvy than they imagine themselves to be. We're encouraged to laugh and wince at their fantasies even to the point of gratuitous sadism—until the camera angle shifts a fraction, of course, and the viewer gets dragged in and cut down to size.
But as many film critics have noted with surprise, the ax never falls in Happy-Go-Lucky. Poppy's bubbly, light-hearted innocence prevails over even her paranoid, racist driving instructor, Scott, who obsesses about maintaining control at all times and who rails at her for caring too little about her passenger's safety. To his feverish mind, she's a symptom of all that's wrong with the country and present times: she cares too little about the future; she seems to think only about herself; she imagines that even learning to drive, with all its possible hazards and stresses, is just a lark.
The driving instructor, played magnificently by Eddie Marsan, isn't the only one to fulminate at Poppy's carefree attitude. Her pregnant sister Helen (Caroline Martin) also finds her somewhat aimless path irritating, as if Poppy's refusing to settle down and have children were a sign of irresponsibility, even selfishness. Intriguingly, Helen imagines that Poppy's relaxed approach to life, including whether she'll partner and have children, is almost a criticism of her own rather dogmatic rules and expectations.
I enjoyed Poppy's spontaneity and her genuine unconcern about other people's expectations. But her chirpiness is also sometimes grating, even annoying. With so much stress in the news and our daily lives, Poppy's happiness seemed less like an antidote to suffering than an almost compulsive disengagement from it.
Why does someone else's happiness sometimes get on our nerves?, the film seems to ask. If we gauge our contentment by comparing it, even implicitly, with other people's—even when we know that doing so is wrong or a mistake—is Poppy's cheerful enthusiasm grating because it somehow magnifies, then trivializes, the kind of stresses and problems we all face? How much happiness is welcome before it starts to seem out-of-touch, willfully naive, even a compulsive defense against reality?
Christopher Lane is the author most recently of Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness. Follow him on Twitter @christophlane
