Happy-Go-Lucky (2008)

This made me think of a New Yorker short story, plunking the reader, er, viewer down into the middle of some action and leaving off at an equally arbitrary point. There wasn't a clear cut story line like most movies, but then, Mike Leigh wrote and directed this (and many others, including the brilliant Vera Drake, Topsy Turvy, and Secrets & Lies). He likes to let his actors improvise in order to help him finish the script; this was evident, especially in an early sequence when our heroine Poppy (Sally Hawkins) returned home from a night of pub-hopping with her roommate, one of her sisters, and another friend. The scene helped to establish her cheerful, childlike character (so different from Hawkins' somber Anne Elliott in the Masterpiece Theatre production of Persuasion in 2007).

One could say the movie was about Poppy taking driving lessons, but there were other sub-plots (I particularly liked the dancing one but wanted to know who was the chanting guy in a later scene and why was she there with him?). Towards the end of the movie Poppy's relentless jokiness started to wear on me, but many were captivated by her optimism the entire time. Eddie Marsan, as the tightly wound driving instructor, was very good and has been nominated for a British Independent Film Award as well as Hawkins (see my next post for the complete list). Special mention must be made of her neon wardrobe, described in the New Yorker as "carnival clothes."