Not Coming to a Theater Near You
What do you think she meant when she said “a huge black monster with giant claws”?
What do you think she meant when she said “a huge black monster with giant claws”?
“The world of the happy man is a different one from the world of the unhappy man,” wrote Ludwig Wittgenstein, who makes a cameo appearance (on the cover of a biography, on a bookshelf) in the opening moments of Mike Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky. And the rest of Leigh’s film bears this out, following the irremediably cheerful Poppy (played beautifully by Sally Hawkins) as she moves through a world largely populated with the dissatisfied, the depressed and the resigned. The magic of Happy-Go-Lucky is the way it both explores Poppy’s world view, giving one of the best cinematic representations of natural happiness I’ve ever seen, and contextualizes it without irony. After all, the environment that Poppy is responding to is the same Britain that Leigh’s been recording with a pretty baleful eye since the early 70s; leaving aside the fact of increased economic prosperity, why is Poppy so blissful in a locale that has made others so sour? As the plot progresses it begins to feel as if Leigh and Hawkins have invented a new mode, the neurological drama. No underlying reason or back-story is given for Poppy’s character – despite a scene involving her pregnant sister that seems like it’s heading in that direction – and the facade never breaks down, leading us to question why we might have assumed that it was a facade. It seems that Poppy is just wired to be happy, but Leigh’s point seems to be that this innate predisposition keeps her from realizing certain unpleasant facts about the world, reading danger signs, and acting in her own best interest. One scene especially, where she engages a psychopathic homeless man at night in a junkyard, is terrifying and touching all at once, and can stand for the theme of Happy-Go-Lucky as a whole: the extreme difficulty of empathy in a world where human beings see and respond to things in fundamentally different ways. The film’s virtue is that it lets Poppy’s unshakeable happiness hold its own against Leigh’s equally terminal skepticism.
by Evan Kindley | Source: 35mm print
08 Nov 2008 10:37 AM | Submit Comment
