Happy-Go-Lucky

Happy-Go-Lucky

118 Minutes

“Insufferable,” my roommate said as we left Mike Leigh’s new film Happy-Go-Lucky. Funny; the word that kept popping up in my head throughout was, “Unbearable.” I guess we were both right.

Mike Leigh, as you may remember, is the award-winning director of such naturalistic contemporary classics as Naked and the delightfully stark Secrets & Lives. He has, in the past, been a proponent of eschewing scripts altogether, allowing the actors to improvise and cultivate something closer to precise and impressively real character studies. We knew something was wrong when Leigh started to produce lighter, more conventional fare, such as Topsy-Turvy– but no one could have ever expected the saccharine tripe that is Happy-Go-Lucky.

I had just finished reading Breakfast at Tiffany’s and was in the mood for something that possessed such easy levity. Happy-Go-Lucky seemed just right. What I would later learn–about five minutes into Happy–is that the film is far closer in tone, concept and subject matter to the opening pages of The Berenstein Bears Learn About Strangers in which an extroverted Sister Bear discovers there are bad people in the world who are not immediately her friends.

And this seems to be the same–and only–problem with which the main character of Happy must contend. Played with hyperbolic spiel, Sally Hawkins is Poppy, a 30-year-old primary school teacher who can’t stop smiling, giggling idiotically, and talking to everyone around her… no matter if they–or we–really want to hear her or not.

The film opens with Poppy popping poppedly into a staid bookstore. Even though she tells the lone worker in the store that she’s glad to be inside from the crazy chaos of the city, the worker wants yet more serene silence than she, choosing to elide her comments until she finally, after about 10 minutes of non-stop yammering, gets the point that someone like she probably belongs out in the noisy world that doesn’t seem to stop or shut up.

It’s all pretty much downhill from there, as we see Poppy dance around the world in her obnoxious go-go boots that even her pugilistic, racist, Christian fundamentalist driving instructor chastises her about time and time again as being inappropriate both for driving and for mature adulthood in general. He may have a point, but it’s the jabbing and insistent force of said point that earns the driver, an absolutely irritating Eddie Marsen, one of the high marks that led us to leaving about 20 minutes early from this stinker.

This becomes the crux of the film that, literally up until we left–at a good hour into the picture–had no kind of discernible conflict whatsoever. Each scene gives us glimpses into this clown who has decided that there’s no need to either grow up or to leave alone people who have. She’s either maniacally doing all she can to get a smile out of everyone around her, or she’s externalizing some superficial sense of ever-more-playful sympathy for people who deserve, if nothing else, far less.

The most offensive moment of compassion is when Poppy decides to follow the sounds of a raving derelict under a bridge in a industrial wasteland. Rather than running for her life–it’s a large city, late at night in the middle of nowhere, after all–Poppy takes to speaking with the mumbling chap, admitting that, yes, she does “know” as he asks her over and over again with stereotypical bum-like repetition: “Y’know, y’know, y’know?”

A similar situation grants us Poppy dealing with a bully in her class who can’t stop hitting the students around him. Once again, Poppy and Leigh take the moral highroad here–circa 1992–and decide to feel bad for the kid, to show us that Poppy really just wants to be the student’s “mate” more than anything else. No concern for the victims of the bully, of the other students in her class. It seems that the worst someone is–a raving derelict, a pint-sized bully, an obnoxiously irate driving instructor–the more he is subject of either affection or harmless laughter in Poppy’s world.

Already nudging me at after the first hour of Poppy’s adventures through playland, my roommate had had enough and I was almost right there with him, opting to wait until there was at least some sort of conflict before finally giving up. A social worker that Poppy meets and with whom she’s more than likely going to see on a less professional visit next time led me to believe maybe someone would finally give her that slap she so desperately deserved… but, no… the next scene gives us a an entirely new plotline involving a pregnant relative, and this is when I realized it at last: time to pop out once and for all.

by Mathew Klickstein