Movie Review – Happy-Go-Lucky

Happy-Go-Lucky (2008)
Written and directed by Mike Leigh

I remember when this film came out, and a significant part of the discourse was how annoying the main character was. In revisiting it, I didn’t find that to be true. Oh yes, Poppy is very positive, but she reminded me of the Kindergarten teachers I worked alongside as an elementary teacher. Her seemingly endless cheeriness serves a purpose in Leigh’s story. It’s a protection against the nihilism of the world around her, which I think we all can admit is easy to sink into. I know that in real life, I probably would feel overwhelmed and overstimulated being in Poppy’s presence for long periods. The mistake many characters make, and I suspect it is the same with the audience, is that because Poppy is so cheerful, she must be a fool. And that is not true in the slightest.

Poppy (Sally Hawkins) is thirty years old and shares an apartment with her friend & fellow school teacher Zoe. Life is a joy for Poppy, even when difficulties arise. Among her friends and pretty much everyone she meets, she is an endless font of positivity & laughs. After her bicycle gets stolen, Poppy decides it is time to learn to drive, and she begins taking lessons from Scott (Eddie Marsan). To say he is the emotional opposite of Poppy is an understatement. Scott slowly reveals himself over these lessons to hold some wild conspiracy-laden beliefs, underlying them are racism & misogyny. He ends up not taking her or the lessons seriously and eventually has an emotional meltdown.

Again, I remember people talking about this film when it came out. They seemed to view it as fluffy, a light comedy. I don’t know how anyone mistakes Mike Leigh’s films that way, but it probably has to do with his focus on working-class people. In the same way that Douglas Sirk’s powerful melodramas were dismissed as “women’s films,” I think Leigh gets a similar short shrift. You’ll hear praise for the aggressively dark Naked (all of that is earned; it is an incredible piece), but much of his career is seen as trifles. I would argue that Leigh’s body of work, and especially Happy-Go-Lucky, examines significant social schisms that most films gloss over or ignore whole cloth.

Because of Leigh’s collaborative & improvisational method of writing dialogue with his actors, we can safely say that Poppy is a co-creation of Sally Hawkins. What we are watching is the opposite of Robert Bresson with his actors-as-models method. This is the performer fully invested in the character, which shows in the performance. Hawkins has thought a lot about Poppy, more than we likely even realize. When Poppy interacts with someone, we explore her psychology. Does she perceive some people as safe & others as threats? Does anything diminish her joy? Is Poppy ever sad? Hawkins answers all of these things through her performance, which I found incredibly moving.

The keystone scene for me is Poppy’s encounter with a homeless, mentally ill man. I suspect that much of the audience’s initial thoughts in this scene were that Poppy was in danger or that she should run away. That’s only engaging with the scene on its most literal level. The importance of that scene comes from what we learn about Poppy. She smiles during the scene but not the whole time. The most important thing she does is listen to and acknowledge the man’s presence as a human being. In that scene, I saw what I saw in the best teachers I worked with: genuine compassion for others, the ability to look beyond the reactive behavior of someone at the moment, and the ability to see them as a person deserving of dignity. 

This is something Scott seems incapable of processing. He immediately condenses Poppy into categories: woman, young, annoying, etc. The most telling moment comes at the end when Scott briefly encounters Poppy’s potential new partner right before a driving lesson. He starts making accusations that Poppy has been leading him on, and the misogyny overflows. Why would he think she was leading him on? Scott is the sort of person who would scoff at a Mike Leigh film as unimportant, the same person who diminished Sirk’s work because of its perception that it was “for women.” I think longtime Leigh collaborator Timothy Spall sums up what I love about the director’s work so well: “I’ve discovered over and over that he makes films at the center of which he puts the sort of people who most other people are thankful, not to be. He gives them nobility. That is his genius.”

Poppy, like Leigh, is an excellent observer of humans. That’s why she’s such a good teacher. To be able to teach someone, you have to be able to truly see that person beyond the surface or even how they present themselves. In seeing a person fully, you understand their needs & their strengths. There’s a third teacher in the mix, Rosita, a flamenco teacher at a dance class Poppy attends. In a fit of momentary passion, Rosita stomps out of the room, memories of a lost lover becoming too much. She returns later, apologetic. This is something I cannot imagine Poppy doing. I can see her becoming emotionally moved and asking for a moment to herself but never storming out. This is because Poppy understands that while she is important, in her role as a teacher, she has to balance her needs and her pupils’. 

Scott is also a teacher and objectively the worst of the lot. This is objective because early in Poppy’s lessons with him, he mentions “letting a client go” and is very cagey about the circumstances. We can surmise what happened with that other client when he finally snaps at Poppy and kicks her out of his car. A good teacher doesn’t unload their personal problems & anger onto their students. That is a type of malpractice, an abuse of the authority you have been given. We come to teachers to learn from them. We can learn about emotions and recognize the humanity in our instructors. However, there should never be a situation where a student is the target of such unhinged hostility.

The homeless man and Scott are the same person at different points in their lives. When Poppy first encounters the homeless man, she listens and asks if he has a warm place to sleep and needs food. She even offers him money. All he can do is reply with incoherent chatter. She never judges him, and she certainly doesn’t pity him. She sees him. This is not Poppy trying to score brownie points or make herself feel like a good person. She has a genuine curiosity about this person and wants to feel a connection with him. We can feel that connection, too. It’s palpable on screen due to the incredible performances. She tries to befriend Scott, and by the end of their working relationship, it is clear that he refuses to see her. She’s just a “silly, stupid woman” in his book. 

While Mike Leigh’s work may feel random on the surface, it is not. There is a creative looseness which is a method the filmmaker prefers. However, he is very intent on what his films are about. They are about seeing people who are often made invisible in cinema. These are movies about mothers, fathers, children, teachers, service workers, caretakers, the homeless, the abused, and all the victims of capitalism. It is no coincidence that Leigh’s work took off during the Thatcher era. That was a period in the U.K. where many people were ignored and made invisible. From what I read, it sounds like that nation is returning to that place. Leigh’s films have never felt more relevant to me than they do at this moment. That makes me a bit sad because you would hope we would have learned something in the forty-plus years that have passed. I highly recommend his work if you haven’t given Leigh a chance. These are some of the most profound pieces of contemporary humanist cinema we have.

I’ve already reviewed several Leigh films that were released after this point. They were written awhile ago and my admiration for the director has likely increased since then

Another Year and Mr. Turner