Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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36 of 40 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Charming, colourful and insightful, 9 May 2008
Mike Leigh is the master of the awkward silence and the cringe, of the emotional distress behind so many people's lives.
On the surface, the relentlessly cheerful Happy go Lucky marks a change from that, because the central character, Poppy, is so irritatingly Pollyanna-ish and upbeat. Sally Hawkins carries the film, showing that behind her silliness and happiness, Poppy is in fact intelligent and sensitive. That said, the whole cast turn in great performances.
This is a much more insightful film than might at first meet the eye, fun to watch at the time, with plenty to think about afterwards. Fun and clever - what more ou could you ask for?
Shot in a glossy palate of primary colours, the whole film, and London in particular, look stunning. Highly recommended.
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19 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
See it and smile, 17 Jul 2008
Poppy, Mike Leigh's latest creation, sails through this slice of life with a smile on her face, fun on her mind and kindness in her heart.
Quite brilliantly brought to life by the excellent Sally Hawkins, Poppy has much to be happy about. A true friend, a nice flat in a Finsbury Park, a job she was born to do,supportive colleagues, An enjoyable social life, making her Happy-Go-Lucky. Many could probably act happy for a few hours but Hawkins manages so well to cover all the detail - the eyes, expressions and body language - to show happiness - and never sadness
Then there is Scott. When Poppy's bike is stolen (it must have "flown the nest"), she is confronted with Scott (Eddie Marsan) the driving instructor.The very antithesis of happy. Scott is rigid, angry, frustrated, impatient, knotted up and racist. A borderline OCD sufferer, who is tortured by who-knows-what in his past. Scott is the most bitter and overwhelming character in a Mike Leigh film since David Thewlis in "Naked". A towering performance.
If Poppy is the light, Scott is definitely the dark, but such dark shadows inhabit the whole of "Happy-Go-Lucky". The unhappy schoolboy, the glum Sister, the social climbing sister who dominates her husband. Little vignettes of irritation and annoyance.
The film is at times both lovely and disturbing, life affirming but carrying a caveat that unhappiness does exist in the sullen faces, in madness, in neuroses.
Happy-Go-Lucky is a highly enjoyable and often very funny film, but it also carries terrible sadness. I have never been a massive fan of Mike Leigh, but I have to admit that I was wrong. He just seems to get better and better.
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15 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Lucky charm, 13 Sep 2008
I have to admit my hopes for Happy-Go-Lucky were not particularly high, so unmoved was I by Mike Leigh's portentious 2004 period piece `Vera Drake'. And for the first twenty minutes or so I felt vindicated, as the jokes come thick and fast and very very flat. Poppy (Sally Hawkins) is a wacky, mildy boho primary school teacher with garish, hippy chick dress sense and garish hippy chick friends to match. With a toothy smile and a grating, relentless optimisim even in the face of abject misery or aggression, some viewers may find empathising with Poppy a leap of faith too far. There is a fine line of course between bubbly and annoying, a line that Poppy straddles cheerily throughout the film. I had to remind myself that almost all of Leigh's characters (Vera Drake excepting) have a cartoonish, almost burlesque vulgarity to them despite the neo-realist grounding in everyday life. There is something fanciful and parodic about this characterisation that I started to warm to surprisingly late in the film. Despite some amazingly clunky dialogue - mostly between Poppy and her sisters or friends - the film was rescued for me by the arrival of Poppy's malevolent driving instructer Scott. A conspiracy theorist, racist and loner, Scott is both laughable and frightening in a way that reminds me of Shane Meadows' anti-heros. I could believe there is something of Scott in many driving instructors (sorry Ken, if you're reading!) which makes this role somehow horribly believable and pathetic.
The film is also enhanced by a non-contextualised, impressionistic sequence where Poppy is seen wandering into a derelict building where she encounters a mad Irish tramp. The tramp, who rambles incoherently, seems momentarily to see a connection in her, and vice versa. "You know?" he jibbers, rehetorically, and staring into his eyes she replies, "yes, I do". The scene is out of joint with the film's focus on Poppy as the chipper Primary school teacher, friend and sister, bent on supporting others, and is suggestive of some private universe that is not made explicit. On one level it adds to the portrayal of her charitable, empathetic nature, but on another it suggests a darker, sadder place that she refuses to ackowledge in front of the loved ones who depend on her.
Modern multicultural London is captured with an eye for its visual grammar that is - refreshingly - both credible and aesthetic. Leigh has lovingly framed the city's archetectural mish-mash of old and new without idealising it, saturating the reds of the London buses without pandering to foreign audiences. The romantic orchestral score adds to the film's winsome atmosphere, in part a homage to the so-called 1950s women's films of Douglas Sirk. Unlike Todd Hayne's brilliant `Far From Heaven`, which lovingly recreated the genre while choosing to cleverly subvert it, Happy-Go-Lucky touches upon the genre lightly - adding a glowing cheeriness to Leigh's often bleak black comedy. The final shot, the camera rising up to take in the lovely scene of the Regent's Park boating lake on a summer evening, just like the ending of `Far From Heaven', is a whistful, almost sentimental homage to 50s filmmaking, but works perfectly. Neither offering resolution or any particular ambiguity, it evokes a change of season both literally and in the lives of its characters.
There are echos from other Leigh films. Poppy's surly, blokeish younger sister is identical to Brenda Blethyn's equally monosyllabic teenage daughter in `Secrets and Lies'. Scott's conspiratorial rants recall those of David Thewlis' pre-millennial diatribes in `Naked'. Those echoes suggest - rather than thematic regurgitation - a return to terra firma for Leigh and also, in my opinion, to form.
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