Life Actually Is Sweet

It’s never easy to synopsize a Mike Leigh film. For some 40 years
now, the rightfully legendary British writer-director has honed a
method of developing his characters and their stories through elaborate improvisations and exercises
with actors, which he the transmutes into concisely scripted movies
whose subtexts and backstories are so rich and multicolored as to feel
almost miraculous. Particularly in the indelible works he’s made in the
past 20 years—including High Hopes, Life Is Sweet,
Secrets & Lies, Topsy-Turvy, Vera Drake, and
masterpiece-among-masterpieces Naked—there’s so much
detail beneath the surface that each subsequent viewing reveals new
layers of possibility.

But to extol Leigh’s subtext is not to disparage his text. It’s just
to say that his surfaces can be deceptively simple. The drama he deals
in is internal, measured on the scale of human
relationships—between parents and children, husbands and wives,
workers and bosses, individuals and institutions. These matters can
look insignificant set against the explosive multiplicity of
entertainment options, which is why Leigh’s radiantly varied body of
work tends to be marginalized, even among art-film crowds; a Mike Leigh
film is always a Mike Leigh film, for good or ill.

His latest achievement, Happy-Go-Lucky, will be no exception.
It’s another breathtaking Mike Leigh film, nearly impossible to
condense. (Want evidence? Try the film’s trailer, easily the worst
preview for a great movie in recent memory.) To say that
Happy-Go-Lucky is about an infectiously optimistic primary
schoolteacher named Poppy who takes some driving lessons from a
high-strung racist, drinks a lot with her beloved roommate, takes
flamenco lessons from a fiery Latina, and finds a perfect boyfriend
while negotiating the travails of contemporary London—well, it’s
not inaccurate. But such a breakdown doesn’t begin to suggest the
complex inner life of the film or of its heroine, who is indisputably a
heroine and not just a leading lady.

Though Poppy’s most obvious trait is that she is tirelessly, almost
politically happy in the face of major and minor adversity, that
happiness is a kind of armor, a vehicle for
self-
preservation—and the preservation of others—in an
increasingly joyless world. After a couple of opening scenes that make
you wonder if she might not be more annoying than charming, as
willfully cheery people so often are in life, she becomes positively
captivating. That’s because her optimism isn’t vacuous. It’s always a
choice. And even when it puts her in harm’s way, it’s always the right
one.

Poppy is played—better to say inhabited—by Sally
Hawkins, who gives the kind of performance that seems impossible under
any circumstances other than a Leigh film, in which such body-and-soul
idiosyncrasy, grounded by clear humanity, tends to be the norm (Eddie
Marsan and Alexis Zegerman also give extraordinary, entirely
distinctive performances). A jumble of clashing pastel colors and
ludicrous plastic accessories, Poppy is impossible to ignore. Though
her wardrobe may seem hyperintentionally zany at first—she
dresses like a girl playing dress-up—it’s clear (and not just
from her bright pink bra and bright orange panties under black
fishnets) that she is all woman. If her clothes were chosen to delight
the kids she teaches, she wears them outside the classroom because they
clearly delight her just as much. A bump in the road on the bus is
enough to make her giggle, but when confronting a school-yard bully or
her own attacker, her blithe voice drops a register and she becomes all
business.

Since Poppy is the center of the movie’s universe, its look and
design radiate outward from her. Startling bursts of color leap from an
outdoor market: a red dress hanging on a stall, a pair of bright yellow
pants, Poppy’s azure frock, her sister’s rainbow jacket. These colors
aren’t merely decorative; they form a corona around our luminous
heroine. The further away things are from her the colder they
become.

Leigh’s visual aesthetic has grown increasingly ambitious.
Happy-Go-Lucky is his first film shot in widescreen, and despite
the relative absence of panoramic vistas, the decision fits. Poppy
exerts a gravitational pull on the vivid, dark, pancultural London in
which this film is set. Her friends love her. Her driving instructor is
infuriated and tempted by her. Her students are enthralled by her. She
even reaches out to a vagrant so damaged by life he can’t finish a
sentence—all this in a widescreen urban context into which
someone so tiny would likely disappear if she didn’t take such pains to
matter. And matter she does. Poppy’s positivity might seem a naive
approach to life in a world as blighted as this one. But having seen
her in action, you can be forgiven for thinking that a person who
chooses to enjoy her life, caring deeply about others, investing her
considerable energy in being a loving teacher and a loyal friend, and
adding color to a dying world, might understand something the
miserable, angry rest of us don’t.