Director/writer: Mike Leigh
Photography: Dick Pope
Music: Gary Yershon
Editor: Jim Clark
Cast: Sally Hawkins, Eddie Marsan, Alexis Zegerman, Samuel Roukin, Karina Fernandez, Kate O'Flynn, Stanley Townsend
I was surprised to find this picture might have a higher profile than I thought or remembered. It got a bunch of awards and nominations and landed on a dozen or more year-end top-10 lists by a range of critics. Notable contrarian Armond White called it the best movie of that year (not necessarily an endorsement). And then, on director and screenwriter Mike Leigh's IMDb page, it shows up second in his "Known For" tally, just behind Secrets & Lies and ahead of Naked and Another Year. That latter was another surprise for me as I have also thought of Another Year as another overlooked gem. Also, yes, I would say Secrets & Lies is probably his best, but I haven't seen it in a while.
It's tempting to call Happy-Go-Lucky the self-conscious inverse of Naked. Where Naked is a portrait of a pathologically miserable human being, Happy-Go-Lucky is similarly a character study about a pathologically cheerful person. Perhaps needless to say, because this is a Mike Leigh picture, both feature amazing central performances. Sally Hawkins is perfect as the relentlessly upbeat Poppy, a single grade-school teacher in her early 30s who hangs out with her friends in London and cracks dad jokes like nobody's business. "Bear with me," says one character. "Is there?" Poppy says. "Where is it?"
I was surprised to find this picture might have a higher profile than I thought or remembered. It got a bunch of awards and nominations and landed on a dozen or more year-end top-10 lists by a range of critics. Notable contrarian Armond White called it the best movie of that year (not necessarily an endorsement). And then, on director and screenwriter Mike Leigh's IMDb page, it shows up second in his "Known For" tally, just behind Secrets & Lies and ahead of Naked and Another Year. That latter was another surprise for me as I have also thought of Another Year as another overlooked gem. Also, yes, I would say Secrets & Lies is probably his best, but I haven't seen it in a while.
It's tempting to call Happy-Go-Lucky the self-conscious inverse of Naked. Where Naked is a portrait of a pathologically miserable human being, Happy-Go-Lucky is similarly a character study about a pathologically cheerful person. Perhaps needless to say, because this is a Mike Leigh picture, both feature amazing central performances. Sally Hawkins is perfect as the relentlessly upbeat Poppy, a single grade-school teacher in her early 30s who hangs out with her friends in London and cracks dad jokes like nobody's business. "Bear with me," says one character. "Is there?" Poppy says. "Where is it?"
The central narrative arc here is that Poppy is learning to drive, taking lessons from the unpleasant Scott (Eddie Marsan), who is a kind of functioning version of Naked's terrible Johnny. What is remarkable to me is how edgy Leigh and Hawkins have made Poppy, who sounds so anodyne from the outside: grade-school teacher, single young woman in London, etc. Very little gets this woman down even though she is fully aware of the awful state of the world. At points it's so reflexive, and her joking style is so off, that she starts to feel almost psychotic. It may be fair to say it's the world that is psychotic and Poppy who only looks that way, except such sentiments don't really accord with Leigh's worldview.
Poppy is charming, and I think most people prefer the company of optimists to pessimists. But she is also just plain weird. She's almost perfectly conventional but that's also what makes her bizarre. One running theme of her jokes is sexualizing everything that can be sexualized, for example. She's not all the way down to "that's what she said" levels but it gets pretty close. She also jokes a lot about drinking and hangovers. She has lots of girlfriends and the style is easygoing banter, but it often feels strained and jarring even as it feels banal and true to life. We learn Poppy has been living inside this cocoon for 10 years or more and somehow it is surprising, it makes her more vulnerable, her shell more obvious.
In many ways the picture is set up like a romantic comedy. All the characters are single and generally looking for love. Not that it's discussed much as such, but more it's just a condition of life and living. Thus, Scott the driving instructor seems like a natural enough role for an enemies-to-lovers story, which is beloved of romance. But there's no chemistry here—or there is, but it feels increasingly toxic as we go along. The more we learn about Scott the more unpleasant he is: rigid, racist, fragile, given to a proselytizing belief in conspiracy theories like Johnny in Naked.
At the same time, the more we learn of Poppy the more strangely unbelievable she becomes: she notices a kid in her class acting out, for example, and seeks help for him from a social worker. Not only do things work out for the kid, but Poppy ends up in a sickeningly wholesome relationship with the handsome empty social worker. These beats are familiar from romance so we accept them at face value, kind of, but Leigh's jaded sensibility belies them at the same time, most obviously in the way he switches up on the enemies-to-lovers thread.
The result is confusing but not necessarily in a bad way. I was fascinated by Happy-Go-Lucky and liked it more the first time I saw it. I'm a little more bewildered by it all now. I've known people like Poppy (though not anyone as extreme as her) and envied their carefree flexibility as life serves up its twists and turns. Early in the movie Poppy's bicycle is stolen. It's obviously annoying, but she shrugs it off and carries on. Something like that would ruin my day, my week, my month. I might be brooding about it still. Let me tell you about the three times bikes have been stolen from me in my life.
In that way I'm closer to Scott, though again (I hope) not nearly as extreme. In fairness to his frustrations, carefree people are late to things a lot, and a scene where Poppy is sitting in on a flamenco class also shows how the fun-loving can be disruptive and make themselves the center of attention for the sake of getting attention.
Late in the picture the story takes a more serious tone with more naturalistic notes. Something is genuinely wrong with Scott, he's much less comic and more like a creepy incel, and underneath all Poppy's blustering joy we finally see a person with a lot of genuine tender compassion, breaking her façade of desperate meet-cute manic pixie dream girl. Thus, as a romance, Happy-Go-Lucky probably has to be accounted a failure in most ways. But it's a pretty good Mike Leigh picture.
Poppy is charming, and I think most people prefer the company of optimists to pessimists. But she is also just plain weird. She's almost perfectly conventional but that's also what makes her bizarre. One running theme of her jokes is sexualizing everything that can be sexualized, for example. She's not all the way down to "that's what she said" levels but it gets pretty close. She also jokes a lot about drinking and hangovers. She has lots of girlfriends and the style is easygoing banter, but it often feels strained and jarring even as it feels banal and true to life. We learn Poppy has been living inside this cocoon for 10 years or more and somehow it is surprising, it makes her more vulnerable, her shell more obvious.
In many ways the picture is set up like a romantic comedy. All the characters are single and generally looking for love. Not that it's discussed much as such, but more it's just a condition of life and living. Thus, Scott the driving instructor seems like a natural enough role for an enemies-to-lovers story, which is beloved of romance. But there's no chemistry here—or there is, but it feels increasingly toxic as we go along. The more we learn about Scott the more unpleasant he is: rigid, racist, fragile, given to a proselytizing belief in conspiracy theories like Johnny in Naked.
At the same time, the more we learn of Poppy the more strangely unbelievable she becomes: she notices a kid in her class acting out, for example, and seeks help for him from a social worker. Not only do things work out for the kid, but Poppy ends up in a sickeningly wholesome relationship with the handsome empty social worker. These beats are familiar from romance so we accept them at face value, kind of, but Leigh's jaded sensibility belies them at the same time, most obviously in the way he switches up on the enemies-to-lovers thread.
The result is confusing but not necessarily in a bad way. I was fascinated by Happy-Go-Lucky and liked it more the first time I saw it. I'm a little more bewildered by it all now. I've known people like Poppy (though not anyone as extreme as her) and envied their carefree flexibility as life serves up its twists and turns. Early in the movie Poppy's bicycle is stolen. It's obviously annoying, but she shrugs it off and carries on. Something like that would ruin my day, my week, my month. I might be brooding about it still. Let me tell you about the three times bikes have been stolen from me in my life.
In that way I'm closer to Scott, though again (I hope) not nearly as extreme. In fairness to his frustrations, carefree people are late to things a lot, and a scene where Poppy is sitting in on a flamenco class also shows how the fun-loving can be disruptive and make themselves the center of attention for the sake of getting attention.
Late in the picture the story takes a more serious tone with more naturalistic notes. Something is genuinely wrong with Scott, he's much less comic and more like a creepy incel, and underneath all Poppy's blustering joy we finally see a person with a lot of genuine tender compassion, breaking her façade of desperate meet-cute manic pixie dream girl. Thus, as a romance, Happy-Go-Lucky probably has to be accounted a failure in most ways. But it's a pretty good Mike Leigh picture.
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