Mike Leigh (2008)
Vera Drake was resolutely optimistic: that made her unhappy predicament all the more wrenching. But Happy-Go-Lucky is being promoted as an optimistic Mike Leigh film and therefore as a new departure – although the main change from Vera Drake consists in, for much of the film, a loss of energy. The optimism is embodied in the main character, Poppy (Sally Hawkins), a bubbly North London primary school teacher – but Poppy (real name Pauline) is affable to an excruciating degree: she’s such a grinning, giggly face-puller that it seems incredible no one, except her misanthropic driving instructor, Scott (Eddie Marsan), tells her to shut up or disappear. If they did, and we saw the effect on her, the first half of the film might be more illuminating: as it is, Poppy doesn’t seem interesting enough to give the story the momentum it needs – and Scott is so pathologically and noisily angry from such an early point that the scenes between him and Poppy don’t build. There’s a risk in Mike Leigh’s way of working that the actors will sometimes spark each other for the sake of it, at a cost to the drama as a whole. (Vera Drake, with its more strongly structured narrative, was able to avoid that risk.) There’s also a risk with Leigh’s approach that consciously ‘light-hearted’ moments in his work will stick out as clumsily artificial (the opening here, when Poppy visits a bookshop and, coming out, finds that her bike’s been stolen, is an example).
Although it includes a visit to desperately social-climbing relatives (Leigh has done this too often by now and usually better), the second half of Happy-Go-Lucky is much better. Poppy first meets Tim (Samuel Roukin), a social worker, when he comes to talk with a boy in her class who has turned aggressive. Poppy and the head (Sylvestra Le Touzel, acting in a style unusual for her and better for it) sit in. The scene is beautifully played all round and the point at which you begin to see how much more range Sally Hawkins has than she’s shown throughout the first hour. The relationship between Poppy and Tim does build, satisfyingly – so does the description of Poppy’s nuanced, ambiguous friendship with her flatmate Zoe (Alexis Zegerman). And the fact that these scenes – rather than the arguments between characters – are the best acted parts of Happy-Go-Lucky makes the film’s outlook seem convincingly positive (although not for the first time in a Mike Leigh film – Phil Davis and Ruth Sheen delivered this in High Hopes). It’s refreshing too to see a positive portrait of a social worker (even if Tim’s solution to the schoolboy’s problems comes too instantly) and a sunny presentation of Camden and Finsbury Park, by Leigh’s long-time cinematographer, Dick Pope.
19 April 2008
